Healthcare reform

[PrincessFiona]

What are your thoughts? From the left or the right. No belittling or name calling. I’d just like to hear a variety of ideas.

Personally, I think healthcare is a human right and that there should be a public option. I don’t support Medicare for all. It is too broken, docs couldn’t pay off their student loans and it would cost too much. I’m more a proponent of the German system. There was a private option and a government option. Both plans had fees directly withdrawn from your paycheck. The employer also contributed. For that, you got basically free care for anything. The differences that I noticed were really on who provided care. Thomas had private insurance, got a single room, and was seen by the chief of the department. I had the public option. In the hospital, I saw the residents and shared a room. Outside of the hospital, I saw the same doctors as Thomas, got same day appointments, and paid pennies for prescriptions.

I have written this in the past tense, but this is how it is.

People have a choice about their plans.

Of course, 90 year old grandma with end stage cancer doesn’t get chemo, she gets hospice because there are limits on what can be spent. That’s a conversation we will have to have here as well.

Kris


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[houseelf]

I kind of think some sort of nationalized system is inevitable. The entire system is crashing. Who can afford healthcare anymore?

What baffles my mind is that Econ 101 starts with the premise of supply and demand. Literally the example used for inelastic demand is always something like emergency care or insulin. We know that market forces are highly inefficient and downright nonsensical when it comes to these items, why are we pretending otherwise? The foundation of Keynesian economics theorizes that the Government should step in to regulate markets when natural market forces can not so and there is a great societal need. (i.e. utilities and trains).

I *hope* we can have a graduated approach. I think this will be easier for the system to absorb and will permit tweaks as to what it looks like as we go. Maybe start with medicare expanding down by five years (Sherrod Brown's idea). Year two would have prenatal care. etcetera. A graduated approach is going to be much easier to swallow by both parties and industry.

All I know is that the current state of affairs is like watching a train wreck. We shouldn't be crying over a youtube video when little toddler Johny has the kind employees of Home Depot making a *walker* for him to use because insurance wouldn't pay for it. I mean this is getting sublime at this point.

[rufflesanddots]

K, what does the German system do for people who don't work? Are they tied to the public plan without paying, or a family member? Just curious.

I'm too ranty to make a coherent argument about healthcare right now. In the last 2 weeks I've had two severely depressed patients with SI with plan/intent sit in an ED for days waiting for a bed, only to be discharged later. It's horrible care. It also costs so much money (whether paid by insurance, charity care programs, and/or patient) to sit there and receive nothing therapeutic. It sucks.

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[PrincessFiona]

In Germany, pretty much everyone was insured. I worked with schizophrenics who got regular hospital care. Social services brought their meds to them under the bridge where they lived.


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