"Healthcare" in the US

[TomUS]

I think that's shit and not good enough. there's no need for the middle man - get rid of health insurance comanies- they're parasitic. you could just pay for it all with fair taxation. no means testing. no perks. no special favours for anyone. no need for loads of accountants and bureaucracy. if you're sick, you get help.

The humongous bureaucracy, billing clerks, worker bees in the bowels of ins cos, insurance salespeople,...as well as the execs like their job security.

 

[Yossarian]

I think that's shit and not good enough. there's no need for the middle man - get rid of health insurance comanies- they're parasitic. you could just pay for it all with fair taxation. no means testing. no perks. no special favours for anyone. no need for loads of accountants and bureaucracy. if you're sick, you get help.

At user level there's very little difference between the UK and Canadian systems, IME. One twist here is that private insurance/healthcare for medically necessary procedures covered by the public system is banned: If people want to jump the queue, they'll have to go to a different country.

 

[Supine]

So in summary - stupid fucking Americans.

 

[weltweit]

A single payer system would be like the NHS no?

 

[spring-peeper]

I forgot that the senate has to pass it.

Now, however, the fate of the nation’s health-care system has landed on their doorstep. And although President Trump on Thursday said with confidence that “we’re going to get this through the Senate,” the reality is that Republicans in the upper chamber might not vote on the American Health Care Act at all. Instead, the Senate will likely try to write and pass its own bill that would then have to be reconciled with the House version and approved by both chambers once more.

How Obamacare Repeal Could Run Aground in the Senate

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

So in summary - stupid fucking Americans.

I'm really not in the mood for this shit this morning. I and many Americans have been working their asses off trying to keep this from being passed.

 

[CRI]

That's true, and the GOP majority there is pretty wafer thin. Still, the Trump administration are committed to ramming this through, having been pretty humiliated that their earlier version didn't make it. Obliterating all traces of anything the Obama administration achieved is the goal, so I wouldn't be surprised if they don't offer some pork/threaten to reveal something nasty about any wavering GOP senators to get it passed

 

[CRI]

So in summary - stupid fucking Americans.

Not a very helpful comment

 

[CRI]

New website helps women self-induce abortion
This is changing what access to safe health care looks like.

It makes me sick in the pit of my stomach to think that in a wealthy "developed" nation, this could become the only option available to many people.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Once again The Onion sums things up nicely:

Nation’s Back Alleys Working To Expand Available Services In Anticipation Of Trumpcare Bill Becoming Law

 

[CRI]

Looks like people are starting to have a read of the Bill that passed through the house yesterday (not surprisingly, plenty of GOP congress men and women said they hadn't read it before voting )

Here's key points from this article.

- New version of the mandate to have health insurance (30% surcharge on premiums for those uninsured for 2 months - to encourage folk to keep paying for insurance)
- Big tax break for the rich, removing 2 forms of tax on higher earners that were used in part to fund the ACA. Also drops taxes on insurers, medical device suppliers, drug companies, etc.
- Federal funding to Planned Parenthood stopped for a year - Medicaid won't reimburse for services and also federal tax credits can't be used for insurance that includes abortion provision.
- Removes cap on charging older people several times more for cover than younger people, and reduces subsidies for low income older people to purchase health insurance
- States can opt in to allowing insurers to charge those with pre-existing conditions more for insurance
- Cuts in Medicaid benefits, or pressure on states to pay for them
- Cuts to school services for disabled children (I tried to post a piece about this, but it was behind a paywall, so I gave up.)
- Weaken restrictions on employer-provided health coverage, so they could reduce/cap benefits more easily

Basically, it's shit.

Part of me hopes it gets watered down or thrown out by the Senate, but I suspect it will get through pretty much unchanged. Republicans have invested alot in obliterating the ACA and they can't do that until they have something to replace it.

Part of me also hopes that people will be so enraged by this that GOP reps in Congress and those up for election in the Senate in 2018 will lose their seats. Even so, plenty of damage will have already been done and that much harder to move back to anything even vaguely close to the ACA. Also, of course, hundreds of thousands of people will have suffered and many died as a result of the AHCA.

Part of me is worried about a couple comments from Sarah Kendzior yesterday - that a government doesn't push through unpopular legislation like this through if they think they could be unseated by "free and fair" elections. With gerrymandering and voter suppression, they're already taking steps to take "free and fair" out of the equation.

 

[spring-peeper]

Pre-existing conditions -

By law, there are not set parameters, and some insurers consider these as pre-existing conditions:
Acne
Anxiety
Asthma
Bipolar disease
Depression
Menstrual irregularities
Sex reassignment
Sleep apnea
Transsexualism
....
Here are the health issues they called pre-existing conditions prior to Obamacare. This list is not comprehensive.
AIDS or ARC
Acromegaly
Alzheimer's Disease
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Anemia (Aplastic, Cooley's, Hemolytic, Mediterranean or Sickle Cell)
Aortic or Mitral Valve Stenosis
Arteriosclerosis
Arteritis
Asbestosis
Cancer
Cardiomyopathy
Cerebral Palsy (infantile)
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Cirrhosis of the Liver
Coagulation Defects
Congestive Heart Failure
Cystic Fibrosis
Demyelinating Disease
Dermatomyositis
Diabetes
Dialysis
Esophageal Varicosities
Friedreich's Ataxia
Hepatitis (Type B, C or Chronic)
Multiple Sclerosis
Muscular Dystrophy
Myasthenia Gravis
Obesity
Organ transplants
Paraplegia
Parkinson's Disease
Polycythemia Vera
Pregnancy
Psoriatic Arthritis
Pulmonary Fibrosis
Renal Failure
Sarcoidosis
Scleroderma
Sjogren's Syndrome
Tuberculosis

Pre-existing conditions: Pregnancy, sleep apnea could make you pay more - CNN.com

In addition to rape, postpartum depression, cesarean sections, and surviving domestic violence are all considered preexisting conditions. Companies can also deny coverage for gynecological services and mammograms.

In Trump’s America, Rape Is a Preexisting Condition

 

[mod]

Can anyone tell me why USA health care is such a dominant story in our UK news and has been for years?

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Can anyone tell me why USA health care is such a dominant story in our UK news and has been for years?

They're trying to get you used to the idea....

 

[CRI]

They're trying to get you used to the idea....

This. I'd have thought it was pretty obvious!

 

[CRI]

Pre-existing conditions -



Pre-existing conditions: Pregnancy, sleep apnea could make you pay more - CNN.com




In Trump’s America, Rape Is a Preexisting Condition

There was a discussion on social media about how people would be even less inclined now to report rape, as it could mean they lose health care coverage. And people who rape will figure this out pretty quickly, too.

 

[CRI]

Assume there will be a few more pennies dropping like this if it gets through the Senate . . .

 

[spring-peeper]

Labrador: ‘Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care’

 

[J Ed]

The Democratic Party Is a Ghost

The ACA, which may or may not die in the Senate, only ever made sense as an intermediate step toward a universal provision of health care. It was a big, ugly, ungainly, cobbled-together thing that, for all the partisan paeans to its wonderfulness and indispensability, never really worked very well.


The part that did work was Medicaid expansion. In other words, the part that worked was the single-payer program that the Democrats so ardently refused — continue to refuse — to endorse. Supposedly the party of incremental progress, they seem to view each increment as the final end state of civilization and history. America Is Already Great, and all that. In order to sell progress as incremental, a series of steps in a journey of miles, there must be some destination in mind, a vision of a truly better society, an ideal. But the Democrats don’t have ideals; they just need you to be scared of Republicans.

Well, fair enough. Republicans are scary, though given the alacrity with which the Democrats rushed to praise Donald Trump for blowing up another little piece of Syria, you have to imagine that this relative terror is a matter of proximity, that the farther you get from the border, the more it appears that the American government moves with an awful unanimity of terrible, singular purpose.

Anyway, the thing about the health care debate, such as it is, is that while every Democrat voted “no,” no one bothered to articulate a compelling alternate vision. Republicans want to kill you! Yes, yes — look, life is a conspiracy against itself; we’re all gonna die. You become inured to this sort of thing after a while

What we want to hear is not that the seas are rising (the Republicans!) and we’re gonna die alone (the Republicans!) and tumorous on the street because our chemo costs $50,000 every half hour and a hangnail is a preexisting condition (the Republicans!). What we want to hear is that there can be a better world, that through collective endeavor we can as a people feed our poor, care for our sick, and find at least some better balance between our rapacity and the health of our planet. Instead we get negation; we get Trump is a meanie and Paul Ryan wants to eat your kids, which does not get the 40 percent of people whose boss is a meanie and who can’t pay their deductibles to the polls.

The specter of Democrats literally singing in the halls of Congress because they imagine that more than a year from now they’ll reap some reward from the GOP’s pettiness and failure to construct any real alternative system is just despicable. Who are these people? Even if the bill dies in the Senate, even if they take the House in 2018 . . . Liberals accuse the GOP of forgetting about people, of sacrificing public good to the cruel idols of their idées fixes, but it’s the ostensibly liberal party that is actually abstracted from the human mass; it’s Nancy Pelosi for whom this whole thing is just a career.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Where do people get the money to be able to afford to get sick?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Can anyone tell me why USA health care is such a dominant story in our UK news and has been for years?

I was thinking about that the other day: I know more about how the American healthcare system works, than I know about how the Canadian one works...

I can certainly empathize with Americans and their problems - but I'm getting a bit tired of this constant inundation of US politics from every media outlet.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Can anyone tell me why USA health care is such a dominant story in our UK news and has been for years?

Scare stories about something like US healthcare coming to the UK do serve a political purpose. Just like NHS "death panels" and the sometimes fairly squalid conditions that Brits put up with can used to frighten US seniors who are often pretty happy with Medicaid.

It is a bit odd really with lavish Continental European insurance based systems often near to collapse that there is so much focus on the US. It's rather more plausible that the UK might sneakily adopt something like those systems than ever mimic the uniquely American and hugely expensive healthcare mess that's evolved in the US. UK policy wonk circles do tend to look to America for everything but in healthcare I've heard more references to the Dutch system from those wanting to dismantle the NHS.

 

[CrabbedOne]

I was thinking about that the other day: I know more about how the American healthcare system works, than I know about how the Canadian one works...

I can certainly empathize with Americans and their problems - but I'm getting a bit tired of this constant inundation of US politics from every media outlet.

Almost everything I know about the Canadian system is based on Republican horror stories about your "socialised medicine".

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Almost everything I know about the Canadian system is based on Republican horror stories about your "socialised medicine".

Well, you can't believe everything you read.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Actually, we have our own healthcare debate going on right now. BC is the only province where the citizens must pay a separate premium for their healthcare coverage. In all the other provinces, it's rolled into the income tax. We have an election coming up next week: one party wants to do away with the premiums; the other one, that's currently in power, wants to keep collecting them [big surprise].

 

[Orang Utan]

Almost everything I know about the Canadian system is based on Republican horror stories about your "socialised medicine".

What are the horror stories?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

What are the horror stories?

Usually about having to wait a long time for treatment; and there's a certain amount of truth in that.

Under our system, acute care for serious problems takes priority, and gets most of the resources. So if you have cancer or a heart attack, you'll get great treatment, immediately.

But if you have a torn ACL in your knee and need surgery, you can end up waiting many months.

 

[Orang Utan]

Usually about having to wait a long time for treatment; and there's a certain amount of truth in that.

Under our system, acute care for serious problems takes priority, and gets most of the resources. So if you have cancer or a heart attack, you'll get great treatment, immediately.

But if you have a torn ACL in your knee and need surgery, you can end up waiting many months.

and THAT'S a horror story, instead of people being denied cancer treatment cos they don't have insurance?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

and THAT'S a horror story, instead of people being denied cancer treatment cos they don't have insurance?

Apparently: ask the Republicans for clarification. They stretch the truth to make it sound like everyone has to wait a long time, no matter how serious the condition.

 

[spring-peeper]

Actually, we have our own healthcare debate going on right now. BC is the only province where the citizens must pay a separate premium for their healthcare coverage. In all the other provinces, it's rolled into the income tax. We have an election coming up next week: one party wants to do away with the premiums; the other one, that's currently in power, wants to keep collecting them [big surprise].

The only time I've heard about the BC elections are concerning the trade wars Hope your party wins.

Did you heard about our floods?