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Almost 100 Million People a Year 'Forced To Choose Between Food and Healthcare' (theguardian.com)
Almost 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty each year because of debts accrued through healthcare expenses. From a report: A report, published by the World Health Organization and the World Bank this week, found the poorest and most vulnerable people are routinely forced to choose between healthcare and other necessities for their household, including food and education, subsisting on $1.90 a day. Researchers found that more than 122 million people around the world are forced to live on $3.10 a day, the benchmark for "moderate poverty," due to healthcare expenditure. Since 2000, this number has increased by 1.5% a year. A total of 800 million people spend more than 10% of their household budgets on "out-of-pocket" health expenses, defined as costs not covered by insurance. Almost 180 million people spend a quarter or more, a population increasing at a rate of almost 5% per year, with women among those worst affected.
The Democrats fixed healthcare a decade ago, remember?
By limiting services as much as possible.
This is so very wrong. As much as we would like to think we have that much effect on the world economy, the reality is that the reason why drugs are so expensive in the USA is because the pharma companies can charge as much as they want. And it is coming to light that most of them are doing just that. Most of the rest of the civilized world took one look at the potential for rent-seeking that could happen in health care and quickly put in fee schedules to keep their citizenry from being robbed blind. Did this slow down progress? Not really, since a majority of the pure research that feeds these drug companies is actually funded by public monies. By the time pharma companies actually start picking up the bill on research of a promising drug, most of the basic research is done. The majority of the private money spent by pharma companies from that point on is in the marketing of that drug. The clinical trials are actually little more than a speed bump in comparison to this. This is true whether the drug is being developed in the US, Germany, France or the UK. And a lot more research is happening in Europe and Asia than in the US right now. And that's in markets where the governments regulate the profits that pharma companies make on their products.
Countries with single-payer health care have better medical outcomes and longer life expectancy.
https://www.oecd.org/els/healt...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, I just can't understand how most of Europe and Canada do it without actually going bankrupt.
By starting 50 or 75 years ago and keeping costs from rising year after year up until the present.
Vermont tried to go single-payer a couple years ago. They couldn’t make it work because there was no way for them to cut doctor and nurse salaries enough to make the financing work out.
If you want to understand, start by learning from Vermont's experience.
www.businessinsider.com/insulin-prices-increased-in-2017-2017-5
"It's led some people living with diabetes to turn to the black market, crowdfunding pages, and Facebook pages to get access to the life-saving drug."
You could have googled it pretty easily.
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/a...
http://www.kaaltv.com/news/mot...
You are welcome on my lawn.
In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay if you don't have a med plan and they can't turn you away.
The ER has to try to stabilize you. They don't have to provide needed treatment beyond that, or drugs — and they won't. What they will do is determine what will stabilize you, do that, give you perhaps one dose of whatever prescription(s) is(are) needed which you can then go get from a pharmacy if you can pay for it, and refer you to a doctor, who you can also go to if you can pay for it, and that's the end of it.
You have cancer? Diabetes? A hernia? You're not going to get the treatment you need for that at the ER. Period. The ER does things that are specific to the moment, like set a broken arm. Still, you get to pay for the meds, and any follow-up care.
ER visits are not even remotely comparable to appropriate medical care for anything serious. People who claim it is have no idea what they are talking about.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Do you know why the UK can negotiate better rates than the US? Because the country negotiates as a single entity and if a drug isn't offered at a reasonable rate then the company may find that they lose their right to sell the drug at all. In contrast, individual hospitals in the USA negotiate rates separately and (on top of having little bargaining power) have little incentive to negotiate good rates because they're going to pass on the costs directly to the insurance companies.
The fact that the US moving to single payer and negotiating drug rates centrally would push up the cost of healthcare in other countries is a pretty weak argument to advance to US health insurance payers as to why they should keep being overcharged.
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Well, I just can't understand how most of Europe and Canada do it without actually going bankrupt.
It's because US people put up a straw man and cut it down. A single payer system means it's funded almost entirely by taxes (here in Norway co-pay is ~$30/visit and capped at ~$250/year), it doesn't mean they got infinite money or resources and it doesn't mean they deliver everything the patients want or need. There's only so many hospitals, doctors and nurses as the budget permits. Treatments are granted based on medical need and ranked based on quality-adjusted years of life. Waiting lists are prioritized on urgency and impact. It's not the best care money can buy, it's trying to be the most fairly distributed level of care possible at that funding level.
Single payer doesn't mean exclusively public employees, there are many private doctors and institutions delivering services into the public system. But apart from that there's also truly private insurance and private healthcare, if you can afford it. It's not subsidized, you don't get a tax refund and it caters to a market that won't wait and won't take anything less than excellence. LIke if a pro sports player is injured and need surgery, they often use that because in the public system they're not special and you can't pay to get to the head of the line. Same way some people bankroll certain medications we've rejected to give because of cost, typically >$100k/year. Even though they're medically proven to work and the patient will die sooner.
So if it's not a happy wonderland, why is it working better? Because we don't have insurance people trying to save costs by denying coverage. We don't have doctors that earn more by billing more or get kickbacks from selling brand drugs. While there's an ever ongoing pressure to reduce costs, we're not looking to cherry pick profitable patients and hospitals don't get stuck with unprofitable ones. For the most part we simply have medical personnel and administrators trying to balance out the limited resources based on who needs it most. And they're actually pretty good at it, as long as they don't get other personal incentives.
Just to take one example, there's a national standard for average ambulance response time which says it should be <12 minutes in >90% of the cases in urban areas and <25 minutes in >90% of the cases in rural areas. Poor or rich area? Easy or hard geography? Doesn't really matter. The money is distributed so it's mostly uniform no matter where you live, we're not quite hitting that metric but then we'd rather fall a little short most places rather than fail spectacularly in a few. Those are the stretch goals, on the low end you have a standard of adequate healthcare which is like a legal minimum. It's a pretty low bar though where violations are usually human error, flaws or failures in the system like say no ambulance is actually dispatched. It's not your typical triage.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
https://www.indystar.com/story...
You are welcome on my lawn.
You "know people"? What about the tens of thousands(studies show 18k-45k depending on methodology, the 18k figure is from conservative estimates) of American citizens who die every year because they simply can't afford to take part in your health care system? I guess since you don't know them, they can fuck off and die?
What you call propaganda is simply truth.
I'm a jr. doctor in Sweden and our (single payer) healthcare costs per capita are way less than the US (even though we rank way up there in costs). Sure, we do have long queues for some diagnostics, especially when the illness in question is not life threatening (such as back pain, which btw generally just gets better on its own in a few years, no treatment other than acetaminophen or some other mild painkiller required). That said, implying as others in these comments have that single payer systems skip cancer tests and other life threatening diagnostic tools is not only misleading, but often based on ignorance or plain lies. Doctors here have full authority to order any damn test we like, the life of the patient goes before all else, anyone telling you different has no clue.
In short, the us system of insurance is inefficient (poor people often can't pay for regular check ups which increase costs when they do have to go to the ER), expensive (find any list of healthcare spending per capita, then remember that you don't even cover all of your citizens) and finally just plain unethical (if you can't figure out why, you're a shitty human being).
Ps. We even have private health care in Sweden, it's just funded publicly. So spare me the "socialist commie" bullshit. And yes, arguing about this makes me mad, which doesn't happen often.