Do you support Nationalized Healthcare?

Suzette, Wrong. I don't give a sh*t how much you give to charity. That's a personal decision you make for yourself, and not for anybody else. However, your concept of charity dictates that you must be very generous, or you have nothing to back up your opinion about what the public should provide its citizens. If you want "everybody to have healthcare without any co-pay" how many famiilies are you now helping with their health care expenses? You can't have it both ways, and criticise others that doesn't.

Oh, when you asked me how much I gave to charity, I didn't realize you both wanted me to quantify how much is given directly to health care issues AND also that you 'don't give a sh*t how much' I give to charity.

Regarding the expenses: priorities. How do you think all the other countries do it?

I firmly agree with Suzette.

There should be basic health care here in the US. It is ridiculous, in my not humble opinion, that we fund amazing space exploration, various wars, complicated spatial defense systems, vast categories of other things, and leave many people desolate of health care.

Co pay is a very middle class salaried concept. May you all not have such trouble in your lives that you understand the immense difficulty of that to many.

But those things bring in more money for big corporations. They are harder to replace than people. People are a dime-a dozen!

People choose in winter between heat and food. Copays for everything shut you down.

I have cataracts myself and I don't know how I will pay for the surgeries. I do have insurance, but I am self employed and the insurance is expensive and the deductible high (5000) There are no hmos in my very large county.

Yes, I will have the surgeries, and I will eventually pay for them, but I look forward to various dunning letters before I get done.

In the meantime, there is a cold winter.

I am educated and credentialed. I happened to have married wrong, in financial terms if not in romantic ones, and
walked from that late with little. I am not a sloth, I have worked for 45 years.

I am relatively well off in that I have a mortgage on a house I can lose any month.

I don't think I have it any where near as difficult as many here where I live.

Diversion of monies, government billions, to Enron or various other corporations in various ploys infuriates me. I admit I am not among the people at a2k who can outline form how the money goes. Let's just say some goodly percentage of that is true waste.

There are many ekeing out sort of wizened lives, say, not being able to fill presciptions, while that is happening. That isn't good for us on the ekeing out side of course, but also not good for the commonweal, to have such a haves and havenot populace.

In Baltimore there are numerous housefires each winter becasue families who cannot afford heat or electicity build small fires in their ovens to try and keep warm. In the same city (less than 100 miles from the Nation's Capital) the majority of the citizens do not have any health insurance. There is one community health clinic for a city of around 800,000, with a full panel of patients. There are four other clinics run by Hopkins, University, Bon Secours, and Mercy that see indigent patients for free, but they also maintain full patient panels. The majority of the city's residents utilize the various ED's in the area for primary care, thus incurring even higher debts that they are unable to pay. Is this the land of the free and home of the brave? The "Shining beacon of freedom and democracy?"

I strongy support the CONCEPT of national healthcare. The problem is that it is simply not a viable concept in today's world. There are a few major hurdles to actually getting it to work.

The cost of keeping up with constantly advancing technology.

The fact that many developed countries have an aging population.

The fact that puplic institutions are naturally less efficient than private ones

In the end I think "market forces" (ie The Rich) will prevail.

osso, I agree with a universal health care system for the US. The reason I believe in a sliding fee system is from my experience with working at nonprofit organizations for the last twenty years of my professional career. Nothing "middle-class" about that! Everybody worked for lower wages and benefits than one can earn working for the government in the same field. When I retired over five years ago, a full time program director with a masters degree and over five years of experience was earning less than $34,000, and we're not talking about a regular 40 hour a week job. Most put in double that amount, because we ran residential programs for the developmentally disabled. A sliding fee scale helped to regulate an excess demand on our programs by making it aware to consumers that there was a logistic limit. It's not a full-proof system, but it has been reinforced by observing our local public hospital in our county where the emergency room is always packed to the brim with not-so-urgent patients. Once in the system, the nurses and doctors are required to perform all the emergency procedures that take up precious time of the health care workers - even for non-urgent medical needs - while some patients with more urgent need wait in the waiting room. Even in Canada's universal health care system, not everything is covered. Many citizens in Canada are covered by employers for some of these "uncovered extras," but not everybody is covered so it's out of pocket. There are many things wrong with the health care system in the US, primarily caused by multiple insurance companies and programs that require an inordinate administrative cost. As an example, no hospital in Canada requires a billing department with many employees. It's often a small office with one computer to send their claim to a government single payer. We spend twice on medical care of what Canada spends, and yet we have over 44 million Americans without health care. There is definitely many things wrong with our health care system - and our politics. As citizens, we are part of the problem of not demanding more from our legislators. They don't seem to have any problem spending over $150 billion on Iraq in less than one year, but not on our own citizens health care program. Things will only improve if we demand change in Washington.

The sliding scale concept proved efficient in Seattle's network of community clinics, at least until the recent economic downturn when the city budget crisis managed to cut feeply into the services and hours of those clinics. they can't even get federal funding, since they advocate birth control and give info on abortion.

Yah, well, divert some star wars money, I say.

People's lives or bloodpressure or kidneys or eyes are shortened versus cold versus food. It happens all the time, even in the low middle class. It is simply ridiculous.

Last year, or whatever exact months it was that the ca energy crisis happened, the fooforaw was about electricity prices. In that time the gas prices shot up more. Bad Winter.

And with poverty goes illness, which leads to more bills, which lead to more poverty. The ambulance service with which I volunteer serves a fairly affluent upper middle class area, with a few apartment complexes filled with the "working poor." I see many examples of chronic medical conditions that have become acute illnesses due to the inablity of those folks to afford their BP meds, or their cardiac meds, or their seizure meds, etc....

c.i. You're right about our system. Each province has a separate system with funding coming from both federal and provincial coffers, but we all pay into the program. Monthly health care insurance fees/premiums are based on a sliding scale with most people paying through mandatory company plans, stipulated to cover yourself and whomever else you wish, children - spouse.
Some doctors charge user fees and there are many procedures not covered and subsequently paid out of pocket, again based on what a person can afford - with fees sometimes forgone altogether. i.e. some plastic surgery, experimental medical treatments, laser eye treatments, dental and ambulance services ECT are not covered.
The catalogs of medical procedures not covered are miniscule compared to the list of those that are.
Yes, we have waiting lists for surgery elective or otherwise but...it's not the horror story most Americans are led to believe. In fact we still have room to treat many Americans who come up here for treatment they can't afford or get at home.
Our research teams - universities, which are funded with the same monies, are second to none and are on the forefront of many medical breakthroughs.
Billing is done centrally, as is distribution. And we all know our drug prices, while high are not nearly as dear as our neighbours to the south pay.
I don't honestly think medical care can be free. A government would spend it's entire budget on health issues alone, but with a well managed system I see no reason why Americans cannot have decent care for all.
Ceili

One of my lifelong friends just retired as chief of emergency at a Kaiser hospital. Via him and others, I am fairly aware of the system, but even at Kaiser, it costs a lot to belong.

Not all who work are on the Full Employment rolls. Many work in part or in full outside of the rolls as "independent contractors", sometimes legitimately in that they have various clients and sometimes not.

I worked for years for UCLA, and got their pension plan (I got 1500, I think it was when I quit after the last nine years.) Then I worked for a private lab and when I left got another small pension, another 1500. Then I went to school, again. A few months into the first year of the next four years of school I started working in landscape architects' offices. After that I never was an employee but a self employed contractor, as we all were, as no land arch office could afford actual employees past the secretary. My ex and I, primarily I, paid for our own health insurance, with nary a claim. After I was licensed, still and now I pay my own selfimployed type insurance, only now, last year at 60, I was paying about $3000 a year, and had, finally, some claims.

Just because the deductible is x doesn't mean you only pay that. My med bills including the insurance payments were approaching 12,000 last year.

Hard when you make the relatively low amount I do.

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Off of the topic of me and on to the system...

Emergency rooms as fixit-alls are some kind of crime. It is completely dysfuntional. Emergency rooms need to do what they function best at, take care of real emergencies.

Getting the insurance industry out of the health care system
I'm reposting an earlier topic as appropriate in this thread.

Getting the insurance industry out of the health care system:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13080

Well, to start with, I don't think the many self employed people should be penalized re their payments for insurance in contrast to employed folk. I admit I don't know the figures, but I suspect the burden is on the solo self employed person.

Personally, I think the health care the system in the supposedly the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth is nothing short of disgusting. According to ads on this very site, the parents of 1 in 5 children have to decide between filling a prescription, or buying food.
The US has become such a puppet of the rich, and I so fear my own country going the same way. It terrifies me.

Pretty big talk for someone that's never used our health care system and has no clue what it entails.



Yes, and according to those same ads I won $6 million this morning. YOU COULD BE A WINNER TOO! Did you ever consider what exactly the purpose of ads are? Try reading something other than someone's marketing hype.

I am one of the estimated 40 million Americans who can not afford health care.

My present inability to pay for insurance is the result of one business decision combined with the present problems in the IT sector. I work as an independent software consultant.

The costs for me to have insurance are simply prohibitive. I have to choose between health insurance, feeding my family and continuing my business. I can afford two of these three things and insurance is the one thing I (hopefully) do without right now.

I am fortunate that my wife and kids have affordable health care that we can continue. However if I get seriously ill, I don't what we will do. In the current economy there are not very many options for people who are in my position.

The present health care situation in the US is simply intolerable. The millions of us who are falling through the cracks realize this.

I think this issue is going to become a big political issue. The pressure will not only come from individuals, but also from businesses. Businesses are starting to feel the pain of health care costs and just maybe, this will be what it takes to fix the problem once and for all.

We are sending $87 billion dollars to occupy Iraq. Can't the government do something to help the millions of Americans who can't afford this basic need?