The system is working. It’s designed to enrich the wealthy and extract that wealth from the poor.
The entire medical industrial complex is not going to give up their wealth willingly.
Plus most doctors are born into money already. They don’t ever associate with ordinary people in the lower 80% of households.
I work for rich people once in a while and they don’t understand why I can’t wait 1 month to get paid. There is a total disconnect, they can’t even imagine how I live, and I’m not the poorest of the poor anymore.
I work construction, and I have to be super mindful of injury, because that’d basically be it for me.
My wife is deaf. She gets given batteries for her free hearing aid plus an assessment from the audiology department once a year.
My daughter was born 5 weeks premature. She was in the ante natal care unit for three weeks.
My daughter also had open heart surgery when she was 9 years old. Full medical team at a world-famous teaching hospital, 2 days in the paediatric cardiology intensive care (nurse to patient ratio 1:1, 24/7) and 2 days in the post-op ward (ratio 2:1).
None of this has ever cost us anything.
America needs to fix its health “service”. While you’re at it, fix your gun laws too (children practising hiding from gunmen in schools? Really??). And your legal system. And women’s rights. And police corruption. Once you get those sorted, the rest of the civilised world has a long list of other suggestions.
fix your gun laws too (children practising hiding from gunmen in schools? Really??). And your legal system. And women’s rights. And police corruption.
I’d say they are all symptoms of the same problem, economic insecurity and misaligned incentives. People like to blame communism and praise capitalism for the results of the cold war, but I see the US making the same mistake that lost the USSR the cold war, but inflexibility and misaligned incentives. The US in the 20th century went from almost unregulated capitalism to a regulated market economy. IMO, it was that ability to change that brought the US ahead, not some magic of capitalism or brokenness of communism. Now we are stubbornly stuck on the ideology that could very well could have led to the collapse of the US in the 1930s.
Take the freight rail strike fiasco and recent train wrecks. Capitalism creates an incentive for the companies to reduce costs as much as possible. The rail unions are practically useless due to a terrible federal law. What we need is a more pragmatic government and population that will allow them to be and pass legislation that deals with it. One reasonable approach is to deregulate the unions a bit to ensure a quality workforce. Another is regulations that micromanage operations. Maybe fine companies in key industries for both preventable environmental disasters and failure operate under the threat of forced liquidation if they can’t get their act together. Another is professionalizing rail workers so no worker will risk personal liability or loss of licensure for cutting corners. Something else?
At the scales we are talking about, there is so much complexity that it is almost impossible to predict the outcome of a policy, so I am a big advocate for flexibility.
Or… We could eliminate conservatives (including neo-liberals) from positions of power. That would also solve these “complex issues”.
Politicians sucking corporate teats and taking legal bribes are the problem, and no one does that better than conservatives.
Healthcare should be free. There should be no matter of ‘affording’ it.
Not possible no one will ‘help’ for free. If it’s free, taxpayers will have to fund it.
Oh the horror! Guess what, that’s exactly how most European countries work. We pay taxes. The rich pay a lot of taxes (not nearly enough but that’s another issue), the poor pay a lot less or almost none (except VAT, which is much more of a burden for the poor than the rich). We have public infrastructure. We have “free” public education. We have “free” public healthcare. We have “free” life saving meds. We have paid sick days. The doctors must get their license by studying and working in public teaching hospitals instead of 100k+ a year private universities. It works. Most of the public systems are still dysfunctional, but it works. No one needs to go bankrupt because they broke an ankle or their kid got the flu.
I’m so fuckin sick of this argument. “bUt mUh tAxPaYeR muNeY”. You’re actively working against your own fucking interests. Enjoy your debilitating lifelong injury that could have been entirely prevented if you had a healthcare system.
If taxes aren’t used to provide healthcare and services to the public, what are they used fo… oh thats right… usa spends it on killing machines…
It is working.
Joe Biden took almost nine million in Big Pharma money. Every member of Congress has probably taken a large sum of money from them too, and they can loan their campaigns money at 20% interest and legally pocket those lobbyist contributions.
That is why diabetics in this country are stuck paying a mortgage payment to inhabit their own bodies. It’s by design, and you will never change it voting for the two ruling parties.
I wish it were something we could change, but on this issue, we’re basically powerless.
Conservatism is a plague of corporatism, deception and death. Conservatives (including neo-liberals like Biden) are the reason we don’t have a legitimate healthcare system. Killing us benefits them.
What’s also sad is that most GPs, interns and generally younger doctors in all fields are underpaid and malpractice insurance costs them a fortune. Healthcare is prohibitively expensive for the patient and most of that money doesn’t even end up with the doctors that actually provide healthcare but instead bleeds out to a whole mess of parasites within the system.
That’s a feature of the system. Plebs do all the work while capital class collects rents which increasingly became lion’s share of every transaction.
Boomers essentially sold out the proffession. Not just medical but every other one also from trades to law.
Summation of conversations I’ve had with a doctor about the healthcare system.
Doctor: “The system needs fixing.”
Me: “Agreed, we need to socialize the healthcare system.”
Doctor:“Not like that, I still wanna be rich!”
How many times have you had that conversation?
Methinks zero.
This is unbelievably fucked up. Everytime I see posts about the healthcare system in the US, it feels like I am reading prompts from a dystopic fiction.
The final bill from my appendectomy (no complications, wasn’t even in the hospital for 24 hours total) in March was $169k USD.
With “good” insurance, I still paid $7k out of pocket.
