Fresh on the heels of having seen Sicko, the new documentary on health care by Michael Moore, I am horrified by America's lack of free health care.
I wish I could go see Sicko, but alas, until someone invents the popcorn-free theater that's not an option.
I guess I'll wait for Netflix.
Well, we do have free health care, but only if your 65 or older and that sort of thing. It's not like we don't know how to do it in some form.
It was demostrated how France, Canada, Britain, and even Cuba has universal free health care. In these countries you don't need a health insurance, you don't need anything when you're sick. You just go to the doctor. Medicine is obscenly cheap in these places, but here it is the other way around.
Not only that, but doctors there focus on the patient's needs, and are not rushed on to the next patient because insurance demands only allow them a certain amount of time with each patient if they plan on keeping their practice open. Also, they don't get reimbursed for talking to a patient and counseling them on good diet or quitting smoking or things like that that make a huge difference in people's health. They are paid for
procedures. This encourages unnecessary procedures, which drive up healthcare costs.
Not to mention many of those tests are not done because they are strictly necessary, but rather they are a means to cover a doc's butt in case of a malpractice lawsuit, it's a way to get past the insurance company's rules that tend to depress the doc's ability to stay in business, and if a hospital is involved, trust me,
I used to write and maintain the bloody software that hospitals across this nation use to analyze the *profit* a doctor is making for a hospital.
If you're a doctor and you're not ordering enough tests to pay for the hospital's equipment -- they will drop you off their list of docs with privileges there. They only want docs who make money for them.
When a person gets sick, they just have to deal with it on their own when they don't have health insurance.
Even if they do get sick, they may have to deal with it on their own. The allopathic medical profession has the money all tied up and jealously guards their market share. This is why they've gone after chiropractors for years (and lost in the Supreme Court) and are again going after them now that the makeup of the Court has changed to favor them. This is why you can be arrested in this country for actually
healing people with cancer (cf. Getzen and his problems in Texas -- he moved to Mexico). This is why traditional remedies that people have used for thousands of years cannot be advertised for the things we all know they are good for. This is why naturopaths can be arrested and tossed in jail if they say anything remotely prescriptive. They have to couch their words *very* carefully so it all can be cast as "just education."
And believe me, I've got a lot more where that comes from.
Oh, did I mention that allopathic medicine was completely unable to cure and not even treat the illness(es) I've had for the last 5 years? Oh someone sure can -- it's why I'm here now instead of bedridden on Oxycontin just waiting to die. We've paid in the neighborhood of $30K a year to keep me alive and get me functional again. The insurance I pay dearly for reimburses me for nearly none of that. It's a damned good thing my husband makes a good income.
As Moore points out in his movie (I saw an interview) thousands (I think he said 18K?) people DIE in this country every year because they do not have access to healthcare.
Even when they do have it, the co-pays and deductibles are a nightmare. I am living in this situation as we speak, so I have a full reality of how ridiculous this health system is here in America.
I've experienced the UK's system and this one. I'll take the UK's any day. btw, you're more likely to survive a heart attack in the UK than here. Why? Doctors and hospitals don't move out of impoverished areas where the populace can't pay the bills -- because it doesn't matter there! They bills get paid whereever you are.
Should we have universal health care in America? Why or why not?
Our system is hopelessly broken and predicated on a number of things that make no sense for the subject of healthcare. Healthcare is treated like a business that sells widgets. Well of course the manufacturer of widgets will want to sell you more widgets. Well, the "manufacturers" of healthcare want to sell you more healthcare than you need too. So it gets expensive and we wonder why?
And on the other side are the insurance companies. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to make profits. They don't have a responsibility to see that we remain or get healthy. So guess what? They do everything in their power to ensure that they don't actually have to provide you with the service you pay them for.
What a crock.
But I don't see what can change our system on the level it requires short of a collapse of the system altogether. Which, I think, is inevitable if we don't have a serious debate about it, and it may be inevitable anyway, because the monied interests are not interested in a change, they are even more powerful now than they were a few decades ago, and they will fight change tooth and nail.
But when 75% of Americans have no coverage and the hospitals are closing because their patients can't pay, maybe then someone will pay attention.
Frankly, I think the Internet and grass roots is the only place where change can really be spearheaded. The mass media in this country have their bills paid by Big Pharma. They are not going to take on the people who pay their bills.
One immediate thing we could do, though, is what Australia did. They realized that pharmaceutical costs were skyrocketing. They went back to the old ban on advertising, and the costs dropped.
It used to be you couldn't advertise drugs here either. We've done it before, and we can do it again. It's a bandaid on a hemmoraghing patient, but it's something.
