What are people supposed to do if they get seriously ill?

[BobTheCoward]

No, the decision is up to the provider to decide if they want to treat you. The customer can only decide to buy if the provider is willing to sell.

Unless you are saying the customer can force the provider to provide a service.

A person unwilling to sell a good at any price is not a seller and therefore not part of a market.

 

[BobTheCoward]

I've never heard of anyone refusing to pay for life-saving medical treatment. Usually, it's that they can't pay for it.



Yeah, that's pretty much nonsense. If I can't afford the cost of life-saving medical treatment, and my insurance company decides not to pay for it, at what point was it my decision to not get that treatment?



I disagree.

Is the difference between cannot and refusal relevant? I don't think it is. I disagree.

But it isnt relevant to the conversation. Ultimately, I think I support your overall stance on the issue. I just think the specific attempt at characterizing a market in a negative light is both poorly worded and a poor strategy.

 

[DavidJames]

A person unwilling to sell a good at any price is not a seller and therefore not part of a market.

Boy that was easy.


Edit - The issue is coverage. I'm for it and the free market, in this case failed.

 

[xjx388]

Boy that was easy.


Edit - The issue is coverage. I'm for it and the free market, in this case failed.

Which free market is that? The healthcare market? It hasn't been free in a long time.

Define coverage. Everyone in America is free to access healthcare, so technically, everyone is covered. You have to separate health insurance coverage from healthcare coverage.

 

[David Wong]

Sure there would. It would be a system based more on free market principles than on government regulation.

The free market principle for health care is "If you get sick, you are costing us profit, therefore you should die."

Just ask the OP. Or the tens of thousands of people who die every year from lack of health insurance. Free Market is profit over everything, and there is nothing more unprofitable than a sick person unable to work.

So under your theory, all people who are sick and are not wealthy, should simply die. Free market at work.

I'll take the alternative, thank you.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Sure there would. It would be a system based more on free market principles than on government regulation.

I wasn't talking about regulation, I was talking about spending. How much of what is spent on health care is government spending? Try for a ball park percentage.

 

[Dr. Keith]

No one seller determines if I can or cannot have access to care. Terms are negotiated. It is up to me whether I choose to meet or not meet those terms.

Ummm, why couldn't you do that under a single payer plan? Do you really think that there won't be niche practices for the rich who want to pay more for better access to care?

I have a relative who is in a practice that has a majority of its fees covered by the patient directly - insurance doesn't cover most of what they do. It is very lucrative and they are not likely to disappear.

 

[MaverickPLM]

I see that some people are forgetting part of a free market for health care is the freedom to deny health services, for any reason, to bolster profits.

There's a reason health insurance companies had to be regulated from denying someone coverage due to a pre-existing condition. It wasn't because of some malevolent urge to refuse people coverage. It was due to providing health care based on profits.

 

[bencg]

...snip Libertopian theory...

What all of your theoretical musings ignore is reality. Your position is based on your ideology, not on the real world.

In the real world a private healthcare system inevitably ends up with poor people not getting healthcare. Even if we accept the fantasy about charity covering some of this there can be no doubt that some people would still suffer from lack of healthcare. This is not a world we should choose to live in.

In every other modern wealthy country there is some kind of safety net and in many countries there is Universal Healthcare, all provided through taxation. It turns out that is much much much cheaper and efficient to provide UHC through taxation. In the UK we pay less per capita for UHC than you pay in your taxes for just medicaid and medicare.

Aside from this the benefits to society of UHC are huge. You can remove a huge amount of stress and uncertainty and suffering in society by having UHC. It's like education, there are knock on good effects from having universal coverage. Just like we don't accept sending children down mines anymore we shouldn't accept letting poor people die and suffer for lack of healthcare, its bad for all of us. Plus you can have this cheaper than you pay in taxes already!

Of course under UHC wait times for major operations will increase relative to being well insured right now. (Contrary to your assertions the quality of treatment under UHC is arguably better as it is driven more by patient needs instead of profit needs.) So there is still a place for top up insurance in a UHC system. In the UK more well off (or insured through work) people can get private healthcare. In practice all this does is allow you to jump a queue and maybe get a private room, the actual operations will be done by the same surgeon as you would have got on the NHS. Emergency care is always provided by the NHS as they have the best facilities and doctors.

Its very telling that there are almost no examples to be found of private healthcare users in the UK getting treatment privately that they couldn't get through the NHS; the only examples there are seem to be of extremely experimental treatments that there is a lack of definitive evidence as to efficiacy. If there really were death panels in a UHC system we should be able to see examples of people getting cancer treatments privately that they couldn't get on the NHS... where are these examples?

 

[xjx388]

I wasn't talking about regulation, I was talking about spending. How much of what is spent on health care is government spending? Try for a ball park percentage.

Roughly 45% of Personal Healthcare Expenditures in 2007 was government spending. This spending covered roughly 30% of the population.

 

[BobTheCoward]

Ummm, why couldn't you do that under a single payer plan? Do you really think that there won't be niche practices for the rich who want to pay more for better access to care?

I have a relative who is in a practice that has a majority of its fees covered by the patient directly - insurance doesn't cover most of what they do. It is very lucrative and they are not likely to disappear.

I am a single payer advocate. That wasn't the point of my post.

 

[xjx388]

What all of your theoretical musings ignore is reality. Your position is based on your ideology, not on the real world.

In the real world a private healthcare system inevitably ends up with poor people not getting healthcare.

All healthcare systems involve rationing of some kind or another. The rich always have the ability to pay for what is not covered. Ask Nikki Blunden.

Even if we accept the fantasy about charity covering some of this there can be no doubt that some people would still suffer from lack of healthcare. This is not a world we should choose to live in.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but in every country, there are people suffering and dying from lack of healthcare. The Single-Payer ideal of Universal Coverage is just as much a fantasy.

In every other modern wealthy country there is some kind of safety net and in many countries there is Universal Healthcare, all provided through taxation. It turns out that is much much much cheaper and efficient to provide UHC through taxation. In the UK we pay less per capita for UHC than you pay in your taxes for just medicaid and medicare.

I'm not against a safety net. I'm against a government run Single-Payer system. I acknowledge that our system has to change.

Aside from this the benefits to society of UHC are huge. You can remove a huge amount of stress and uncertainty and suffering in society by having UHC. It's like education, there are knock on good effects from having universal coverage.

it seems to me that you are conflating UHC with Single-Payer. A free-market system is universal in that everyone has access to it. Uninsured Americans have access to Medical care right now.

Just lik we don't accept sending children down mines anymore we shouldn't accept letting poor people die and suffer for lack of healthcare, its bad for all of us. Plus you can have this cheaper than you pay in taxes already!

it is yet to be demonstrated how the USA can provide a Single-Payer plan for less tax expenditure.

Of course under UHC wait times for major operations will increase relative to being well insured right now. (Contrary to your assertions the quality of treatment under UHC is arguably better as it is driven more by patient needs instead of profit needs.) So there is still a place for top up insurance in a UHC system. In the UK more well off (or insured through work) people can get private healthcare. In practice all this does is allow you to jump a queue and maybe get a private room, the actual operations will be done by the same surgeon as you would have got on the NHS. Emergency care is always provided by the NHS as they have the best facilities and doctors.

Yes. So the better-off can end their suffering faster than the poor.

Its very telling that there are almost no examples to be found of private healthcare users in the UK getting treatment privately that they couldn't get through the NHS; the only examples there are seem to be of extremely experimental treatments that there is a lack of definitive evidence as to efficiacy. If there really were death panels in a UHC system we should be able to see examples of people getting cancer treatments privately that they couldn't get on the NHS... where are these examples?

Nikki Blunden and others like her are examples. She got a donor to provide the money to fund her drug. It's ironic that this same drug is paid for by major insurers in the US.

 

[Lyrandar]

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but in every country, there are people suffering and dying from lack of healthcare. The Single-Payer ideal of Universal Coverage is just as much a fantasy.

I think at this point, there's a lot of the perfect solution fallacy being thrown around on both sides. Neither the ideal free market system or the ideal single-payer system is going to cover everyone.

At the moment, though, with the examples I have for comparison being the US and the UK for free market and single-payer systems respectively, I have to say the single-payer system looks like it's going to have fewer uncovered people and treatments. Now, you've stated that the US system is not perfect and needs to be changed, but what changes are you thinking of, and what concrete examples do you have that show that the free market will then do a better job?

Particularly with an eye to the OP - I feel like the problem he mentions, that of basically dreading the possibility of dying from an entirely treatable illness, would simply not exist in some type of national single-payer healthcare system. He still has to worry about the untreatable ones, of course, but then so does everyone under any system.

 

[rustypouch]

Because there are people out there who are willing to pay thousands of dollars a year to prevent others from receiving care they don't 'deserve,' for some strange, ideological reason.

 

[Region Rat]

No. Actually I was turned down for a job recently because they didn't want me on their health insurance program. Otherwise I was qualified.

Isn't it against the law to ask a person's medical history on their applications and interviews?

I thought it was. There are many things that cannot be asked in an interview. I was not aware that a company could run an applicant through their health insurance company for clearance before they hired them. I know that an interviewer cannot ask a woman if she is pregnant so they don't have to cover the childbirth costs. This seems fishy.

 

[thaiboxerken]

I'm saying that the system needs to change, but not to a Single-Payer system. The government needs to get out of healthcare, not increase it's role.

That's right, then it could be as nice as Russia's healthcare system.

 

[Darth Rotor]

So is it your opinion people shouldn't have access to life-saving healthcare and should be left to the whims of Darwin's law?

1. Don't be putting words into somebody's mouth.

2. I apologize for being mostly rude to you. Was in a grumpy mood, and you got caught in the frag pattern.

3. I have said all I am going to say, and have zero confidence that you actually wish to have a discussion on this ... your mind is not open, as I see your posts, and quite frankly I have no patience for the silliness that is advertised as "skepticism" in threads on this topic.

Again, sorry for the pointless rudeness, you didn't deserve that.

DR

 

[boooeee]

*Remember that I'm excluded from health care because of my medical history. Unless I want to pay as much every month as I would for a house mortgage there are no health care plans for me.

Travis - Have you applied to PCIP or MRMIP?

It's specifically for people who have been turned down for health coverage. If you're in your twenties, you can get covered for $200 a month (much cheaper than a California mortgage).

 

[Dancing David]

silly post removed

 

[gnome]

Travis - Have you applied to PCIP or MRMIP?

It's specifically for people who have been turned down for health coverage. If you're in your twenties, you can get covered for $200 a month (much cheaper than a California mortgage).

nah, government should get out of health care. Sorry, Travis.