After posting the piece about Nurses traveling to Germany and reading the feedback. I would like to open up a debate on this BB about "Universal Health Care" or "Single Payor Systems"
In doing this I hope to learn more about each side of the issue. I do not want to turn this into a heated horrific debate that ends in belittling one another as some other charged topics have ended, but a genuine debate about the Pros and Cons of proposed "Universal Health Care or Single Payor systems" I believe we can all agree to debate and we can all learn things we might not otherwise have the time to research.
I am going to begin by placing an article that discusses the cons of Universal Health Care with some statistics, and if anyone is willing please come in and try to debate some of the key points this brings up. With stats not hyped up words or hot air. I am truly interested in seeing the different sides of this issue. This effects us all, and in order to make an informed decision we need to see "all" sides of the issue. Thanks in advance for participating.
Michele
I am going to have to post the article in several pieces because the bulletin board only will allow 3000 characters.So see the next posts.
As to the idea of "social responsibility," that’s simply nonsense.
Edited to add: When I talk about social responsibility, understand that I am not talking about the "ideal." Clearly, if each of us was willing to work for the betterment of society as a whole, rather than for our own advantages, the world might be a far better place. Whether you recognize it or not, this is hive mentality. Unfortunately, we are not ants. Such an ideal ignores human nature, which was the ultimate downfall of Marx' theory. People do not work for abstracts. People do not work for the betterment of society, their own condition ignored. And until you can address this fundamental point of human nature, your arguments are philosophically dead in the water.
WHO has asked anyone to ignore their own condition, Personal and Social responsibility can coexist in one human being.
Frankly, I think it is quite fair to post information to linked sources. Instead of making blind assertions I make it a point to share links which is meant to allow others to follow back and make their own minds up about the issues at hand. Information is also posted as a refutation of postings by others that appear to be erroneous. The data does not appear to support the assertion that a profit driven health care system is capable of assuring universal access to quality care. The indisputable fact of our health care system is that we lag behind the rest of the industrialized world in health outcome measures and that is why we need to rethink the underlying assumptions of our current system.
“I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have a program. I’m not a communist or a socialist. I guess I’m a left-libertarian and a populist, and I believe in the Bill of Rights the way some folks believe in the Bible.”
January 2007: Populists and liberals
“Listen, a populist is someone who is for the people and against the powerful, and so a populist is generally the same as a liberal—except we tend to have more fun.”
nobody's safe. that's the warning from the first large scale study of medical bankruptcy.health insurance?that didn't protect 1 million americans who were financially ruined by illness or medical bills.
a comfortable middle class life style?good education? decent job? no safeguards there.most medically bankrupt were middle classhomeowners who had been to college and had responsible jobs--until illness struck.
nobody's safe. that's the warning from the first large scale study of medical bankruptcy.health insurance?that didn't protect 1 million americans who were financially ruined by illness or medical bills.
a comfortable middle class life style?good education? decent job? no safeguards there.most medically bankrupt were middle classhomeowners who had been to college and had responsible jobs--until illness struck.
reimbursement is made from a fund to which many individuals exposed to the same risk have contributed certain specified amounts, called premiums.
payment for an individual loss, divided among many, does not fall heavily upon the actual loser. the essence of the contract of insurance, called a policy, is mutuality.
at the base level any insurance program involves a socialization of risk. in other words spreading the risks over a group so that no one loss is too great to bear. by definition smaller groups and individual policies increase the loss exposure risk for the individual. the smaller the group the greater the administrative costs with fewer dollars available for payment of health benefits. we are paying on average 31% of our health care dollars for administrative costs and benefit denial specialists. we can and must do better for the people of our society.
canada and germany and japan and all the other industrialized nations with universal health care follow the social-insurance model. medicare, too, is based on the social-insurance model, and, when americans with medicare report themselves to be happier with virtually every aspect of their insurance coverage than people with private insurance (as they do, repeatedly and overwhelmingly), they are referring to the social aspect of their insurance. they aren’t getting better care. but they are getting something just as valuable: the security of being insulated against the financial shock of serious illness.
however, given the us government’s history of involvement in social programs, it will take more than "it doesn’t have to be that way" to get me to agree. show me an efficiently run social program. show me a program that is not weighted down by an overwhelming administrative burden.
as to the idea of "social responsibility," that’s simply nonsense. this idea is based on the fundamentally flawed principle that i have an equal or greater responsibility to support others as i do to support myself and my family, and that is a recipe for disaster.
if your teeth are bad, you’re not going to get a job as a receptionist, say, or a cashier. you’re going to be put in the back somewhere, far from the public eye. what loretta, gina, and daniel understand, the two authors tell us, is that bad teeth have come to be seen as a marker of “poor parenting, low educational achievement and slow or faulty intellectual development.” they are an outward marker of caste. “almost every time we asked interviewees what their first priority would be if the president established universal health coverage tomorrow,” sered and fernandopulle write, “the immediate answer was ‘my teeth.’ ”
the u. s. health-care system, according to “uninsured in america,” has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the united states is unpaid medical bills. half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. people with pneumonia who don’t have health insurance are less likely to receive x rays or consultations. the death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insur-ance. because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can’t get better jobs, and because they can’t get better jobs they can’t afford health insurance, and because they can’t afford health insurance they get even sicker. john, the manager of a bar in idaho, tells sered and fernandopulle that as a result of various workplace injuries over the years he takes eight ibuprofen, waits two hours, then takes eight more—and tries to cadge as much prescription pain medication as he can from friends. “there are times when i should’ve gone to the doctor, but i couldn’t afford to go because i don’t have insurance,” he says. “like when my back messed up, i should’ve gone. if i had insurance, i would’ve went, because i know i could get treatment, but when you can’t afford it you don’t go. because the harder the hole you get into in terms of bills, then you’ll never get out. so you just say, ‘i can deal with the pain.’ ”
comment: read between the lines, these are people who are capable of greater economic attainment and because of the non-system we as a society are helping them to fail instead of succeed.
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instead, the united states has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. what does that extra spending buy us? americans have fewer doctors per capita than most western countries. we go to the doctor less than people in other western countries. we get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other western countries. we are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. american life expectancy is lower than the western average. childhood-immunization rates in the united states are lower than average. infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier western countries have more ct scanners than the united states does, and switzerland, japan, austria, and finland all have more mri machines per capita. nor is our system more efficient. the united states spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. and, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance
as to the arguments about admnistrative bloat the data shows the current american system is far more bloated than the rest of the world. we do have efficient social programs in the us. ss costs less than 1% to administer. medicare's administrative costs are only about 5%.
why is our current system superior when it fails on so many patient outcome measures when compared to single payer systems and costs more?
the issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. it is, instead, about a few very simple questions. do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? in the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. the reason the united states has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem.
three laudable proposals, two of which have enjoyed bipartisan support,will be introduced to the state legislature soon.one of them , the wisconsin health plan, would offer affordable health insurance alternatives to all wisconsonites while preserving the current employer- and insurer company driven structure. another , the wisconsin health care partnership plan, would require employers to pay for a single administrator to provide coverage for wisconsin employees and their families while allowing others to buy into a seperate pool for the same coverage. a third alternative, offered by the coalition for wisconsin health, would create a comprehensive single payer sytem that would cover every resident of wisconsin , period.
opponents of these kinds of innovative proposals claim that universal access to healthcare is impractical or too expensive.
but a new realistic interpretation of these plan's failure to move forward is a shortage of political will to overcome the resistance of entrenched interests that benefit from the current system.
I am just so sick of the control that insurance companies have over our lives and the government and banking laws not only allow it but promote it. A friend of mine just moved back from Florida after one year she said that the cost of housing insurance has caused the monthy house payment to go up by as much as $700 a month..this does not mean the quality of the house has been improved this is just in insurance cost. We can't get medical care unless we have insurance, we can't own a home without insurance, we can't have a car without insurance, when will malpractice insurance be mandated. Insurance companies have been given too much power and too much money it is time they were stopped. Where have our freedoms gone...they are tied to insurance companies.
If we don not have universal healthcare it will be becasue the insurance companies have prevented it from happening with their power base and money.
I am just so sick of the control that insurance companies have over our lives and the government and banking laws not only allow it but promote it. A friend of mine just moved back from Florida after one year she said that the cost of housing insurance has caused the monthy house payment to go up by as much as $700 a month..this does not mean the quality of the house has been improved this is just in insurance cost. We can't get medical care unless we have insurance, we can't own a home without insurance, we can't have a car without insurance, when will malpractice insurance be mandated. Insurance companies have been given too much power and too much money it is time they were stopped. Where have our freedoms gone...they are tied to insurance companies.
If we don not have universal healthcare it will be becasue the insurance companies have prevented it from happening with their power base and money.
Yes , the insurance companies have us by the short hairs, dont they. All the more reason to let NOTHING stop the badly needed reforms. I hope that intelligent thinking people can continue to grow politically stronger and vote in the people who are going to make change happen, IF they dont, its up to the citizens of this country to get them out of office.Ive been trying to figure out why working class people who post on these forums are so blind to what is really going on in this country, how did they get so misinformed, I blame it on political hacks like Rush Limbaugh and others who for the last 6 years have been spewing hate, inequality, that greed is good and normal, etc, etc, etc. But I really think it goes much deeper, our society has lost its social conscence and the ME society has taken its place. I know Im asking to get flamed here, but we need to take a good look at ourselves. And I do not believe by caring for others we harm ourselves, the American dream is not something that has to be wrapped up in greenbacks.
Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.
Please: Keep the posts polite here. Sure, this is a hot topic and bound to get people hot under the collar. Before you post something rude or inflammatory, please take a break and walk away before hitting the reply button. Also, please stay on topic. Thank you!
I have read a lot of the posts in this specific topic forum. Most of you are very supportive of socialized health care. Some of you have turned this forum into a complaint department for insurance companies. BTW- "they don't care."
I must add my my own opinion. In theory socialized health care would be wonderful; however, as Americans we can not take the step to socialize health care. We are a democratic country. We can not allow the country to dictate health care. The country miserably fail at providing this. Our country is failing in Social Security already. This country is not based on socialism. It just can't work.
If we had socialized health care, taxes would be much higher. Most of us in this forum are nurses and should have insurance. It is nice and altruistic to lobby for social health care for our patients, but none of us would enjoy losing our money to taxes.
I could spend all night offering arguments against socialized health care, but I am going to bed. I will leave with one question.
Do we want to allow the government to manage our chosen career field. The government would surely cut corners and make our job miserable. Our pay would take a halt. Overtime would be cut back. Staffing ratios would be worse. Do we want an organization that feels that faulty wars are more important than feeding starving children in our own country to write our paychecks?
Simplepleasures
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