[Zombie]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

I didn't say collapsed, but they often do have inferior care in that there are longer waits, you get one level of care, etc. Not that it doesn't work at all. We do actually have government health in a variety of ways and it caused problems. In my state, Washington, our ER's are clogged with welfare recipients with runny noses and real emergencies have to wait. I had a temperature of over 105 back in March and I had to wait in the ER for 5 hours to get treated. Had I just gone to my neighborhood clinic, I could have gotten right in. The ER is government mandated, whereas my neighborhood clinic is market based. Our laws here are written in such a way that no ER can refuse someone on welfare, so they just go into the ER whenever there is a problem and it's gotten to the point where the hospitals are financially strained because of the load the government has put on them. Plus, insurance costs are ridiculous here because of government mandates. We have something very close to socialized health care here and it is broken beyond belief. Other states are not nearly this bad. We also have medicaid on the federal level and suppliers rip the government off because the process is too big and cumbersome for proper oversight. We would be a lot better off with some serious health care reform here certainly, but a government takeover would compound the problems.

We do need serious healthcare reform, but I'm certainly not sure a government takeover would make the problems worse. We've got to do something, because it's already awful, and as you said, we'd be better off with some serious change.

The rich are taken care of because they can afford to pay. The welfare recipients aren't as well taken care of as the rich are, but they do get care via the government medical programs. It might not always be the BEST care, but they do get it.

The problem with our current system is that the people that suffer most are the working poor, and the middle class. These are people that make slightly too much to get gov't help, but not enough to pay for insurance on their own.

I would venture a guess that a lot of those people in the ER waiting room with you were not actually welfare recipients, but the working poor - those with no insurance at all.

The costs of a doctor visit are prohibitive if you do not have insurance. People with no insurance can't afford preventative care, so when they do get sick, they end up having to wait and see if it gets better, and if it doesn't, then they have to go to the ER because it's the only choice they've got - the ER can't turn you away. And by the time they get there, perhaps whatever problem they had to begin with has gotten so much worse that the stakes are upped and they require more intervention than they might've if they could have just seen a regular doctor 2 weeks before to get an antibiotic.

In our failure to ensure that these people have the means to keep themselves well, we only manage to collectively shoot ourselves in the foot. The working poor are the backbone of the country - these are the people that bag your groceries, make your restaurant food, clean your office building, run the checkout lane at Target, assemble things in factories, and serve lunch in your child's cafeteria. We rely on these people for so many things, but we do not make sure they are healthy enough to do them. Even worse, we punish them when they do get sick - a week or even a day off of work at a job like those mentioned above can sink you financially when you live paycheck to paycheck, and that's without taking into account the fact that you might lose that job entirely for being gone anyway.

If one of the causes of the staggeringly high healthcare costs is the number of people on gov't assistance, then I think it would make sense to make sure that we prevent people from ending up in a situation where they NEED that welfare - like, say, the checkout girl with bronchitis that couldn't afford a doctor visit to get help before it got really bad, ended up missing a week of work because she couldn't breathe, subsequently lost her job, and ended up on the dole...or worse.

And yes, there is a "worse" - the pack of jackals that I call my children and I live with the catastrophic consequences of American healthcare in its current incarnation every day, and I know we are not alone - the stories might differ, but the message is the same: if you can't afford to pay for a doctor, then you don't count. You don't matter. You're not worth it.

We've put healthcare in the same category of luxury items like yachts and private jets and Escalades, and it sets up its own little version of the Mason-Dixon line - if you've got the money, then you deserve medical care, but if you don't have the money, then you shouldn't have been so stupid as to go and get yourself some cancer in the first place, dumbass. It essentially turns the US government into the mother of all suburban housewives, scolding, "THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!" should any of its offspring be so careless as to break a limb without being able to afford to get the bone reset. We are setting a finite dollar amount on the value of a life, and letting millions of Americans know that they just don't stack up.

People in countries with socialized medicine may have to wait for their care when it comes to certain procedures, but at least they know they'll get it at some point, that they're considered worth it. And even if you're absolutely convinced (erroneously or otherwise) that the socialized medicine systems of other countries are no good, there's nothing saying we can't devise a program that does "work" whether it's similar to what they do or completely different. We (theoretically) have the monetary resources, so why not attempt to correct the problem by finding a solution that benefits EVERYONE?

The system we have now has done nothing more than create sick people that can't afford to get sick, but can't afford to get well, either - and really, when all is said and done, what does it say about us as both a nation and as human beings that something so basic as health can be described as a "luxury"?