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"Healthcare" in the US

www.cnn.com

Canada to Trump: You can't take our prescription drugs

Canada is putting the kibosh on President Donald Trump's efforts to lower drug prices by importing medications from our northern neighbor.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com

Canadian health minister Patty Hajdu on Friday announced new measures to protect the country's drug supply from bulk importations that could worsen drug shortages. It bars the distribution of certain drugs outside of Canada if that would cause or worsen a shortage.

"Our health care system is a symbol of our national identity and we are committed to defending it," Hajdu said. "The actions we are taking today will help protect Canadians' access to the medication they rely on."

Importing drugs from abroad, particularly Canada, is a centerpiece in Trump's plan to reduce prices, a key priority of his campaign and first term. After the President issued an executive order in July that pushed to allow such importations, the Department of Health and Human Services issued in a final rule in late September establishing a path for states and certain other entities to set up drug importation programs.

President-elect Joe Biden has also expressed interest in allowing consumers to import drugs from other countries as along as the federal government deems them safe.
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I'm not sure if this is going to be a post or a rant. I'll apologize in advance if its turns out to be a rant.

Monday evening I get a phone call from a friend. Her husband had just been taken to the ER in an ambulance and she didn't feel safe driving herself and asked me to come take her to the hospital. After her husband had gotten off of work Monday, he cracked open a beer and sat down after a long day. Somewhere in the next few minutes, he fell over and couldn't get back up. His right side wasn't working and he'd hurt his foot when he fell. So I rush over and drive her to the hospital.

We find him in a room by himself. Possible stroke and no one in the room. Seemed a little weird to me. They'd placed him on a heart monitor and taken blood. I noted that his blood pressure was 168/110--high. High enough that they should have given him something for it if they though he was having a stroke. It was two hours before we saw a tech who ex-rayed his foot. Two hours after that and we get two aides who came in and splinted his broken foot. Soon after a nurse came and took him for a CT scan--four hours after a potential stroke. A long time after that a doctor comes in and says "I see your blood alcohol level was up." He then, relates that the CT scan didn't show evidence of a stroke so they've decide to release him. Keep in mind that he still has trouble with movement or feeling on one side of his body and can't speak a coherent sentence. This is approximately six hours after he fell so any alcohol he had in his system would have processed by now. We tried arguing, but didn't get anywhere and felt like they were getting ready to call security. So with the help of hospital staff, we put him in the car and take him home.

When we got him home, we couldn't get him into the house, and he fell when we tried to get him out of the car. My friend called her neighbor, who helped put him back in into the car so we could go back to the ER. They weren't happy to see any of us. They finally realized that there might really be a problem about 4:00 am the next morning (10 hrs post-stroke), and arranged to move him to a stroke center. At the stoke center, they did an MRI and found that he'd had a series of mini-strokes. They're now talking about six weeks in a care hospital to get his function back enough to send him home.

And for all of that, the bill will be tens of thousands of dollars--probably hundreds of thousands by the time he gets to go home. Much of that cost could have been avoided if they'd have just paid attention and administered stroke medications in a timely manner. The costs might be bearable if you got top-notch care, but you often don't.

Yep, that was a rant. I'm allowed one per day. :)
 
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Yuwipi Woman said:
I'm not sure if this is going to be a post or a rant. I'll apologize in advance if its turns out to be a rant.

Monday evening I get a phone call from a friend. Her husband had just been taken to the ER in an ambulance and she didn't feel safe driving herself and asked me to come take her to the hospital. After her husband had gotten off of work Monday, he cracked open a beer and sat down after a long day. Somewhere in the next few minutes, he fell over and couldn't get back up. His right side wasn't working and he'd hurt his foot when he fell. So I rush over and drive her to the hospital.

We find him in a room by himself. Possible stroke and no one in the room. Seemed a little weird to me. They'd placed him on a heart monitor and taken blood. I noted that his blood pressure was 168/110--high. High enough that they should have given him something for it if they though he was having a stroke. It was two hours before we saw a tech who ex-rayed his foot. Two hours after that and we get two aides who came in and splinted his broken foot. Soon after a nurse came and took him for a CT scan--four hours after a potential stroke. A long time after that a doctor comes in and says "I see your blood alcohol level was up." He then, relates that the CT scan didn't show evidence of a stroke so they've decide to release him. Keep in mind that he still has trouble with movement or feeling on one side of his body and can't speak a coherent sentence. This is approximately six hours after he fell so any alcohol he had in his system would have processed by now. So with the help of hospital staff, we put him in the car and take him home. We couldn't get him into the house and he fell when we tried to get him out of the car. My friend called her neighbor, who helped put him back in into the car so we could go back to the ER. They weren't happy to see any of us. They finally realized that there might really be a problem about 4:00 am the next morning, and arranged to move him to a stroke center. At the stoke center, they did an MRI and found that he'd had a series of mini-strokes. They're now talking about six weeks in a care hospital to get his function back enough to send him home.

And for all of that, the bill will be tens of thousands of dollars--probably hundreds of thousands by the time he gets to go home. Much of that cost could have been avoided if they'd have just paid attention and administered stroke medications in a timely manner. The costs might be bearable if you got top-notch care, but you often don't.

Yep, that was a rant. I'm allowed one per day. :)
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That is fucking appalling, rant fully justified.
 
5e2ed2bd9fd43c27f57fcf3b7f7ab445992f3df5.jpg
 
Americans close to the border come here to buy their insulin.

Trump changed the law to make it legal.
That was his way of reducing the cost of prescription drugs - buy them in Canada.
 
Fucking hell. Even being conscientious in death comes with a price tag in the US.

Just today I had some fuckwit on Reddit try to claim that all the stuff about healthcare in the US being expensive was a bunch of lies being spread by other Reddit users.

Thankfully the bootlicking piece of shit got a whole bunch of downvotes for their troubles.
 
NoXion said:
Fucking hell. Even being conscientious in death comes with a price tag in the US.

Just today I had some fuckwit on Reddit try to claim that all the stuff about healthcare in the US being expensive was a bunch of lies being spread by other Reddit users.

Thankfully the bootlicking piece of shit got a whole bunch of downvotes for their troubles.
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This patient was charged $40 for crying. I did a search and found that other people had been charged all over the country for this as well.


Some appointments with doctors can be quite traumatic, and crying is a perfectly normal, human response. Charging people extra because they shed a few tears is bizarro world stuff.
 
I don't understand how anyone could be happy with the US system, except perhaps those that are profiting from it.

If they just thought of the British system as one of proper health insurance rather than socialism, perhaps it would be easier to stomach.

There is no doubt in my mind that the UK system is superior.
 
weltweit said:
I don't understand how anyone could be happy with the US system, except perhaps those that are profiting from it.

If they just thought of the British system as one of proper health insurance rather than socialism, perhaps it would be easier to stomach.

There is no doubt in my mind that the UK system is superior.
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They don't want to pay for other peoples health care.
 
weltweit said:
I don't understand how anyone could be happy with the US system, except perhaps those that are profiting from it.

If they just thought of the British system as one of proper health insurance rather than socialism, perhaps it would be easier to stomach.

There is no doubt in my mind that the UK system is superior.
Click to expand...
Even if the Yanks don't want the UK system there are plenty of middle grounds such as the Canadian, Australian or French systems where the state effectively takes the role of the insurance company or the German system where there is private but well-regulated insurance and a state run and funded scheme for those who don't or can't afford private schemes. The US is the only developed country left that doesn't provide free or heavily subsidised health care for its citizens.
 
UnderAnOpenSky said:
They don't want to pay for other peoples health care.
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The reality is that they pay more than we do for other people's health care though. If they implemented an NHS, they'd save billions of dollars a year in federal subsidies alone (the savings in private health costs would be in the trillions).
 
agricola said:
The reality is that they pay more than we do for other people's health care though. If they implemented an NHS, they'd save billions of dollars a year in federal subsidies alone (the savings in private health costs would be in the trillions).
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They also needed federally set drug prices.
 
I have heard Americans saying that they aren't paying when others get ill. So selfish and short sighted, what happens when they themselves get ill? They go bankrupt at the moment is the answer!
 
America Was in an Early-Death Crisis Long Before COVID
Atlantic 21/07/22
In every country, the coronavirus wrought greater damage upon the bodies of the elderly than the young. But this well-known trend hides a less obvious one: During the pandemic, half of the U.S.’s excess deaths—the missing Americans—were under 65 years old.
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Even though working-age Americans were less likely to die of COVID than older Americans, they fared considerably worse than similarly aged people in other countries. From 2019 to 2021, the number of working-age Americans who died increased by 233,000—and nine in 10 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if the U.S. had mortality rates on par with its peers. “This is a damning finding,” Oni Blackstock, the founder and executive director of Health Justice, told me.
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The crisis of early death was evident well before COVID. As many studies and reports have shown, since the turn of the 21st century, “midlife ages are where health and survival in the U.S. really go off the rails,” Wrigley-Field told me. “The U.S. actually does well at keeping people alive once they’re really old,” she said, but it struggles to get its citizens to that point.
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They might die because of gun violence, car accidents, or heart disease and other metabolic disorders, or drug overdoses, suicides, and other deaths of despair. In all of these, the U.S. does worse than most equivalent countries, both by failing to address these problems directly and by leaving people more vulnerable to them to begin with.
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MickiQ said:
Even if the Yanks don't want the UK system there are plenty of middle grounds such as the Canadian, Australian or French systems where the state effectively takes the role of the insurance company or the German system where there is private but well-regulated insurance and a state run and funded scheme for those who don't or can't afford private schemes. The US is the only developed country left that doesn't provide free or heavily subsidised health care for its citizens.
Click to expand...

We used to have a fairly functional system. As usual, this changed during the Reagan administration. Before Reagan our insurance companies were required to be mutual insurance. In mutual insurance, the insured person is also considered a shareholder in the insurance company. When there was a profit, it was returned to the policyholders in the form of a dividend. This did several things. It aligned the interests of the insurance company with those of the insured. It was in their interest to provide quality care and to prevent expensive relapses or have people not able to afford their medications. It also encouraged the insured not to use the system frivolously in the hope of getting a dividend later in the year. This seems like a good compromise to me from our current system. It isn't government run and it aligns everyone's interests in the system with each other. It was efficient and affordable enough for a woman to give birth and be kept in the hospital for a week afterward. Now, you give birth and you're released less than 24 hours later (and it still costs thousands and thousands).

In our current system, I believe most of our problems are due to every party in the system having different interests that aren't compatible, and the power lies with people whose only interest is profit. Take the profit mongers out of the system and it will be a better system.
 
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Yuwipi Woman said:
We used to have a fairly functional system. As usual, this changed during the Reagan administration. Before Reagan our insurance companies were required to be mutual insurance. In mutual insurance, the insured person is also considered a shareholder in the insurance company. When there was a profit, it was returned to the policyholders in the form of a dividend. This did several things. It aligned the interests of the insurance company with those of the insured. It was in their interest to provide quality care and to prevent expensive relapses or have people not able to afford their medications. It also encouraged the insured not to use the system frivolously in the hope of getting a dividend later in the year. This seems like a good compromise to me from our current system. It isn't government run and it aligns everyone's interests in the system with each other. It was efficient and affordable enough for a woman to give birth and be kept in the hospital for a week afterward. Now, you give birth and you're released less than 24 hours later (and it still costs thousands and thousands).

In our current system, I believe most of our problems are due to every party in the system having different interests that aren't compatible, and the power lies with people whose only interest is profit. Take the profit mongers out of the system and it will be a better system.
Click to expand...

Early release post-delivery isn't unique to the US. A friend of our daughter's arrived to show her the new baby five hours after it had been born. :eek:
 
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