America's Coronavirus Testing Lags Far Behind South Korea and China (axios.com) 276
The news site Axios (founded by former Politico staffers) reports on an issue discovered at an Atlanta lab for America's Centers for Disease Control that was manufacturing "relatively small amounts" of coronavirus testing kits for laboratories around the country. Sources familiar with the situation in Atlanta tell them that manufacturing has now been moved to another lab.
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn confirmed to the site that there had been problems with "certain test components." The Commissioner also said the problems had been resolved and "were due to a manufacturing issue," and said the FDA has confidence in the current manufacturing of the tests they're distributing, which "have passed extensive quality control procedures and will provide the high-level of diagnostic accuracy we need..."
Axios adds that "It was not immediately clear if or how possible contamination in the Atlanta lab played a role in delays or problems" that America's been experiencing with its coronavirus testing: The U.S. government had admitted to problems with its diagnostic tests -- which have put the U.S. well behind China and South Korea in doing large-scale testing of the American public for the coronavirus... As of Friday, South Korea had tested 65,000 people for the coronavirus; the U.S. had tested only 459, per Science Magazine. China can reportedly conduct up to 1.6 million tests a week. Although the World Health Organization has sent testing kits to 57 other countries, the U.S. decided to make its own.
There have also been problems with the tests themselves. On Feb. 12, the FDA announced that health labs across the country were having problems validating the CDC's diagnostic test, Science reports in an in-depth account of what went wrong with the tests.
The FDA announced yesterday that public health labs can create their own diagnostic test. Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told Science that he expects that public health labs will be able to do 10,000 tests a day by the end of the week.
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn confirmed to the site that there had been problems with "certain test components." The Commissioner also said the problems had been resolved and "were due to a manufacturing issue," and said the FDA has confidence in the current manufacturing of the tests they're distributing, which "have passed extensive quality control procedures and will provide the high-level of diagnostic accuracy we need..."
Axios adds that "It was not immediately clear if or how possible contamination in the Atlanta lab played a role in delays or problems" that America's been experiencing with its coronavirus testing: The U.S. government had admitted to problems with its diagnostic tests -- which have put the U.S. well behind China and South Korea in doing large-scale testing of the American public for the coronavirus... As of Friday, South Korea had tested 65,000 people for the coronavirus; the U.S. had tested only 459, per Science Magazine. China can reportedly conduct up to 1.6 million tests a week. Although the World Health Organization has sent testing kits to 57 other countries, the U.S. decided to make its own.
There have also been problems with the tests themselves. On Feb. 12, the FDA announced that health labs across the country were having problems validating the CDC's diagnostic test, Science reports in an in-depth account of what went wrong with the tests.
The FDA announced yesterday that public health labs can create their own diagnostic test. Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, told Science that he expects that public health labs will be able to do 10,000 tests a day by the end of the week.
I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:4, Insightful)
Will the same be true in the states?
Re:I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:5, Insightful)
Will the same be true in the states?
Hahahahahaha no. Oh, before you ask, no we don’t have sick days by right either. You must be new to America.
Re: I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:3)
Re: I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:4, Insightful)
the U.S. had tested only 459
We have the CDC running around playing make-believe that they have any idea what is going on. My guess is that tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans are infected or have been infected over the months and have shown few or no symptoms. Look up how many people fly in a sealed tube and cough on each other every day.
What the CDC has done is to have a sample set roughly equivalent to a single point. They need to be testing tens of thousands as they have that many tests available and more in the pipeline. What they are continuing to do is negligent!
Re: I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:2, Insightful)
Negligent? We've put Dr. Pence on the job. He'll get it done with thoughts & prayers.
Anyway, if our testing lags behind, that's actually a good thing. Maybe we can keep them in the dark until after the election. Wouldn't want to end up with a healthcare system, now.
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The CDC has indeed been caught flat-footed, the pandemic response team was gutted in 2018 by the executive branch and not replaced [snopes.com]. In order to quickly spin up a response you need a team assembled and ready before a pandemic hits.
This seems to be a classic case of penny-wise and pound-foolish attempts from the executive branch to save money. Or perhaps a more cynical view is it's a classic case of crippling a government agency so that it fails at its tasks and it becomes more politically expedient to priv
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Only 8 states have them,
That's an extremely misleading statement, which I imagine was intentional.
The eight states listed have laws guaranteeing sick leave - but that doesn't mean people living in other states don't get sick leave. I have sick leave, for example, even though I don't live in any of those states. All my employed friends and family who live here also have sick leave. For some of them it's separate sick leave, while for others it's a pool of shared leave days - but they all have it.
Re: I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:5, Insightful)
What is guaranteed and protected by law and what is generally done because it's a damn good idea for all are two very different discussions.
The fact that you and all your friends have sick leave doesn't mean everyone in the state does. Likewise the fact that you have medical insurance through your employer doesn't mean America is good, it means you're luckier than those people your country deems expendable.
Gig economy (Score:4, Informative)
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Supply and demand, baby. Enjoy getting fisted by the invisible hand.
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Re:I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:5, Informative)
The same test kit that cost between 5 and 10$ pretty much anywhere in the world is about 3200$ in the US. How did you expect it to be any way else? Capitalism... they call it the best we've come up with!
If capitalism were at work in American healthcare, there would be competition and the price would come down. The high price tells you that medicine is a monopoly.
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One of the factors that contributes to this is many of the countries with "universal healthcare" have price caps, which seems like a fantastic thing to those countries. But to the countries that don't have the price cap, we get to subsidize the actual cost of things like test kids and pharma.
The idea that price caps in other countries makes American healthcare more expensive is nothing but a lie from the pharma lobby. Medications that we export are priced relative to what the market will bear in each importing country; if a country has price caps that a manufacturer deems unacceptably low, it just does not sell that compound there. Many countries choose to pay more for imported drugs than their pharmacies charge the consumer. Such subsidies are coming from their own taxpayers, not from generous
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A private company in the USA is the first one to create a vaccine. [wsj.com] The only thing slowing it down is government mandated testing.
And no, the CDC isn't charging people for testing, although their insurance may still have to pay for treatment if they're bad enough to be in the hospital.
Re:I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:4, Insightful)
A private company in the USA is the first one to create what they believe is a vaccine. [wsj.com]
Fixed that for you.
Until we test the vaccine, it may just as well be snake oil.
Re: I believe testing is free in Korea (Score:3)
But as the article says, the test kits have been hard to validate they actually work. Even in China and Korea there have been reports and China has not given any information on effectiveness of their test kits and quarantine protocols.
I can test a few million people too if I owned the means of production, the means of dissemination of information and the results didn't matter except for propaganda purposes.
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He was charged $3000 for a flu test - which countries with nationalized healthcare systems would almost certainly have refused to give him under the circumstances. That's one of the ways we save money, by not letting people with cold symptoms just ask for tests and get them.
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Your post seems to imply you think healthcare in the US is cheaper than in countries with nationalised healthcare systems. Is that what you think?
Your post also seems to imply you think citizens of countries with nationalised healthcare can act as consumers, demanding and receiving tests for diseases as and when they feel like it. Which is interestingly at odds with the standard critique of, say, the NHS by right wing Americans, who say that patients are routinely denied care.
Of course, how it *actually* wo
This can't be true (Score:5, Insightful)
America has the best health care system in the world. There's no way Third World garbage countries could do better than the United States of America at providing health care for their citizens.
Where's that damned sarcasm emoji?
Re:This can't be true (Score:5, Funny)
America also has the best government money can buy.
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Nah, Venezuela is what you get when you insist in having a government but just can't afford one. It's like that car that some people have who are in the same position, where they'd actually be better off without one but never learned that they can actually exist without one.
British Columbia had more tests than the USA (Score:5, Informative)
This was on the news tonight: the Canadian province of British Columbia has tested more people for COVID-19 than the entire United States [globalnews.ca].
For reference, B.C.'s population is about 5.1 million.
The entire population of Canada is less than 12% that of the USA.
Let this sink in for a bit ...
While the majority of Americans still believe in corporate propaganda and vote against universal health care, branding it as socialist (as if that is bad), and so on ... all to their detriment, and just making the powerful more and more rich ...
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Your phrase "the same government" makes no sense. The OP didn't use the word government or any equivalent term. You could not have provided clearer proof that you are arguiing with straw-men of your own making if you'd tried.
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The only things worse than big government are big corporations. They're just as incompetent, but also have zero accountability.
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Well, at least the government has to pretend it gives a fuck about you. Corporations have no such obligations unless you're a shareholder.
And (Score:2)
it probably costs 10x as much in this country.
U.S. plans ‘radical expansion’ of coro (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.reuters.com/video/... [reuters.com]
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar on Sunday would not predict how many Americans would contract coronavirus, but said the U.S., which currently has the capability to test 75,000 people "in the field," is planning a "radical expansion" beyond that in the coming weeks.
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Please specify, what's supposed to expand radically? Because the way it looks, they mean the infection rate.
Faith based healing (Score:2, Troll)
Our situations is exactly what you would expect from people who value gut feelings over science. Pence is in charge of this, and he is on record as saying that smoking does not kill and condoms do not work. If he is write then we are screed because defense against desires like this depends on our understanding of barriers and breathing.
Re:Faith based healing (Score:5, Informative)
You know nothing about religion, or science, or the history or practice of the two.
Here's a start. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Faith based healing (Score:4, Informative)
Here's an amazing fact for you: just because some Christians are capable of practising science without allowing their scientific practice to be damaged by their religious beliefs, that does not imply that Pence is capable of understanding science without allowing his understanding to be damaged by his religious beliefs. In case you hadn't noticed, he's in charge of the science of this, but he's not only not a scientist, but he makes no claim to be a scientist, so your list of religious scientists is completely irrelevant.
Here's another amazing fact for you: the key phrase is in the OP's post was "Our situations is exactly what you would expect from people who value gut feelings over science". Your entire critique is based on a strawman that reads more like "Our situations is exactly what you would expect from religious doing science".
If you were a religious person hoping to demonstrate that religion is no barrier to the kind of clear thinking that science (and the coronavirus crisis) require, you've done a terrible job of it. Thank god for that list of people you posted. What's the phrase that comes to mind? Oh yes, "You are vastly cognitively inferior to, in both religion and science, every single person on the list."
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I said nothing about Pence. I addressed faith and its supposed antipathy to science.
Most every scientific discovery that allows us to even address virology and the genetics behind it were, in fact, discovered by people on that list. Try reviewing it, and have the intellectual honesty to allow yourself to have evidence regarding your positions.
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As I said, you fought with a strawman in your head. And you are continuing to do so.
The OP referred to:
1. Pence
2. Faith-based healing. Not science-based healthcare carried out by people of faith, or healthcare based on the scientific work of people of faith.
3. "People who value gut feelings over science". Not science-based healthcare carried out by people of faith, or healthcare based on the scientific work of people of faith.
And in my post, I specifically didn't make any assertion along the lines of a supp
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Kinda like Ronald A. Klain, a lawyer and Obama's Ebola Czar.
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Woosh.
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Their most amazing achievement is that they didn't let religion get into the way of science. That is something I can actually applaud.
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That list would be more convincing if being a heathen was not punishable by death during their lifetimes.
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No it wouldn't. That's irrelevant to science. As is the enormously higher number of people killed and scientists imprisoned by Stalin and Mao, for not being atheist.
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Unfortunately, you're an idiot. Sorry.
You literally directly state your false dichotomy irrationality with what you think is a brilliant metaphor.
You are vastly cognitively inferior to, in both religion and science, every single person on the list.
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So are you claiming God and religion helped them in their scientific endeavors? Then how do you know they were actually smart? A parrot can repeat what it's told.
Or perhaps their Christianity was entirely irrelevant to their accomplishments.
Did you also check what color socks they were wearing?
Maybe I should have used wool and linen so you non science types could understand the metaphor.
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First and foremost, it's clear that the very notion of a "logos", that is, that there's an overall structure of truth to reality, is what enables both science and religion. If you knew something about philosophy, religion, or science, this would become clear to you.
Unfortunately, you don't.
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Jesus fucking Christ on a fucking pogo stick you are bad at proselytizing. Are you actively trying to make athiests hate you and all religion? Based on the egotism evident in your post, I have a good idea who you think God really is.
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Wow that’s a bold statement, based on just nine words.
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I'll be bold, sure.
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So? Darwin was theist as much as he was an atheist. [wikipedia.org]
I never suggested God won't be using evolution to eliminate you for me, anyway.
Why bother testing except for random sampling? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's face it, a bunch of us are gonna get really sick and the weakest are going to die. Changing what you do every day based on hysteria is stupid. Maybe the thing will burn out and go away. Ride it out - we have no other choice. Overreacting is probably way more damaging.
We should take this as a wake up call. The government needs to treat disease as a national defense policy. We need vaccines more than we need drones and spaceships.
While we're at it, let's all buy cruise ship tickets to China for all the anti-vaxxers.
Re:Why bother testing except for random sampling? (Score:5, Informative)
China tests a million per week... It's largely under control in china now. That could change, but China's measures seem to work.
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Re:Why bother testing except for random sampling? (Score:5, Insightful)
What on earth makes you say diagnosis isn't complicated? This disease has no unique pattern of symptoms. It's literally impossible to tell it apart from another upper respiratory tract infection on the basis of symptoms alone. And it's also sometimes asymptomatic and it's also sometimes very mild. All of this makes accurate diagnosis very difficult, absent testing.
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The problem is that it takes a few days 'til you hear the quack despite the duck already sitting in the room.
When you kill funding (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When you kill funding (Score:4, Informative)
Fake news: the Trump administration attempted to reduce funding to the CDC (and to a lot of other agencies as well), but it was maintained by Congress. Executive branch merely proposes the budget, they don't decide what's in the final version of it.
Re:When you kill funding (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be a dumbass. The Trump administration has killed the things it has direct control over, and put placemen in charge to fuck up the rest.
"In 2018 alone, on the day that the World Health Organization called Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the administration recalled $252 million in emergency response funds for rapid response to outbreaks. 2018 also saw the shutdown of the National Security Council’s global health security unit, the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s epidemic response teams and decimation to the funding of the CDC’s global health section, reducing the number of countries where the CDC worked from 49 to 10."
These things happened. They were done by the Trump administration. They were stupid moves and they hurt the US's response to coronavirus. It's truly pathetic to see you lot breaking stuff and then pretending you didn't.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
Re:When you kill funding (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand it's really difficult for you to imagine how a country's capabilities to respond to one infectious disease could possibly have any bearing on its capabilities to respond to another, especially a whole two years later, but that is really a function of you being an absolute melt, rather than anything else.
I also understand why you'd find it difficult to conceive of good reasons to spend money on making things better for brown-skinned people in a whole different country**, but once again, that's a function of your being a complete melt rather than anything else. I see absolutely no value in taking your question at face value: you know exactly what the reasons are, and have your little answers for why those reasons aren't right all loaded up and ready to be spaffed out into an uncomfortable recipient, like a BoJo spunk-stream. And like his spunk-stream, it's all just self-serving bollocks with negative consequences for the world.
** Am gonna go with the assumption you're just fine with spending money on bombing people in this category given a rationale that pushes your buttons. Feel free to deny, and do go ahead and sputter indignantly while you do so, if it helps
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No, I'm not fine with "bombing people". If you voted for Clinton, you were. Trump had just ended the longest war in US history the other day.
I'm in favor of spending emergency preparedness funds right here in the good ol' US of A, rather than pissing them down some shithole half a world away.
CDC is MIA (Score:5, Insightful)
It now turns out that the personnel overseeing the quarantine of the evacuated people was not properly trained in isolation protocols. Not surprising, since the CDC's pandemic response team was disbanded 2 years ago (to pay for his tax cuts).
Yeah, that's what happens when you appoint incompetent flunkies.
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One administrator on the National Security Council responsible for coordinating pandemics got fired and two others were re-assigned to report to someone else. That's the sum total of your "disbanding". Had zero effect on the CDC itself.
The CDC's budget hasn't been cut in decades, let alone during the Trump Administration. Funding was re-allocated by law, a law [apnews.com] passed during the Obama Administration. Trump's budget did _propose_ cutting the chronic disease budget back to enable the CDC to focus their work on
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One administrator on the National Security Council responsible for coordinating pandemics got fired and two others were re-assigned to report to someone else. That's the sum total of your "disbanding". Had zero effect on the CDC itself.
The pandemic response team was not re-formed afterwards. So yep, it was disbanded. And we're seeing right now that the effects are most definitely there.
The CDC's budget hasn't been cut in decades, let alone during the Trump Administration.
Liar, liar, pants on fire! CDC budget 2016: $7.178 billion, CDC budget 2018: $7.020 billion. Trump administration has CUT the budget, even in absolute numbers. It's even more drastic if the inflation is factored in.
Re: CDC is MIA (Score:2)
The CDC's budget for 2018 was 11.9 Billion. [hhs.gov]
Wherever you're getting your uncited facts, they aren't accurate.
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One administrator on the National Security Council responsible for coordinating pandemics got fired and two others were re-assigned to report to someone else. That's the sum total of your "disbanding". Had zero effect on the CDC itself.
Your wrote a lot of words to just agree that the US Pandemic Response Team was disbanded.
Re: CDC is MIA (Score:2)
The point is that's not the team in the CDC which would respond to a pandemic. It's a couple of administrators on the NSC.
The CDC still has literally billions of dollars dedicated to respond to infectious diseases like coronavirus. Calling one coordinator position on the NSC being eliminated something significant is a gross exaggeration.
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The CDC trusted the Communist China propaganda numbers?
Why did the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, MI6 not tell the CDC what the real numbers are?
Do the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, MI6 not trust the CDC with their real collected data sets?
The only way that idiocy makes any sense is if China was over-reporting the numbers, and it was in fact far fewer people who were infected and dead.
Otherwise why not prepare?
You don't believe the hoax theory do you...
Drive Thru (Score:2)
Scotland and New Zealand are doing drive-through testing while the US only today told State medical labs that they were no longer forbidden to do testing.
Also, apparently every US Governor is a bitch and didn't tell the CDC to go to hell a week ago which they should have done to protect their citizens.
It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Few folks are going to go to the doctor to get tested to begin with because:
1) A doctor visit is expensive for many to even consider. My own visits cost between $100-$200 USD just to walk in the door until my deductible is exhausted.
2) Few folks can afford to be off from work for even a few days. ( No paid sick time ) Extended periods of time ( quarantine ) are right out of the question.
3) Who takes care of their kids / pets if they get quarantined ?
4) Who pays for the hospital stay if you test positive and get quarantined ?
The US has made health care so stupidly expensive only those with outstanding insurance and / or piles of money at their disposal will consider getting tested.
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True. And in the end it will cost them more than having everyone tested at their expenses and not gotten sick in turn because the sick would have been tended effectively before they could infect them.
One day of sick leave costs my employer thousands. Right now we're being badgered to do mobile working "whenever possible and there is no compelling reason to be in office". Simply because they fear that if the virus somehow makes it into the building, the sick days alone could cost milliions, just for lost pro
Re:You know why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Utter bullshit.
The system was *always* broken. Large segments of the population couldn't get insurance at all. That's broken.
And you seem to have forgotten that high deductibles were a *conservative* idea to incentivize people to use the free market to drive down costs. You should be happy about how your experiment is working out.
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You are a liar and/or a fool. This is 100% leftist bullshit, you probably know that. The high deductible is a function of *having to cover pre-existing conditions*, so that the cost of having at all it not as high. Covering pre-existing conditions makes the entire system *cease to be insurance*, it's merely making someone else pay for your problems.
By the way, Trump also predicted this, pretty much right down the line. When he failed, due to people like you and their stupidity, to get rid of
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And what are people with pre-existing conditions supposed to do?
Just die?
What, specifically, is your solution?
Re:You know why? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Covering pre-existing conditions makes the entire system *cease to be insurance*, it's merely making someone else pay for your problems."
This is why it's important to align on objectives. Most people, including in America but almost certainly not including you, think the objective of a funding system for healthcare should be to ensure that everyone can get the care they need, from cradle to grave -- including those who cannot pay eg tiny babies -- and affordably. (I'm sure you agree tiny babies ought not to have to pay for their healthcare, but I'm not sure how you think that should happen).
The cheapest way to achieve that objective of affordable care for all is to create a *risk pool* covering that entire population, from cradle to grave, with cover provided for a very wide range of interventions. NB, a risk pool is not the same thing as an insurance model.
Attempts to de-risk the risk pool in some way -- to move towards an insurance model, in other words -- always cost more money overall, and while they can lower the costs for some participants, they also always ensure that some people will not get all the care they need, from cradle to grave, affordably. Why do they always cost more money overall? Because you lose economies of scale, increase admin costs, and move attention away from bearing down on provider costs. Why do they also always ensure some people won't get the care they need, affordably? Because insurance only covers defined risks for a defined beneficiary for a defined period of time, and the purpose of de-risking the pool is to push some risks from covered to not covered: to ensure that some people have a condition or treatment that's not covered, or have become uncovered (eg through divorce or change of employer), or have an illness that started at the wrong time. The pool isn't de-risked unless the risk has been pushed from the pool to some of the participants (or ex-participants). This is why European Bismarckian (insurer-based) systems have higher costs-of-care and lower coverage rates than Beveridgean systems (tax-funded), and it's also why they're regulated to ensure consumer costs are lower and coverage rates are higher than market forces alone would dictate.
I don't know what your objective is.
At a guess, based on what you've said so far, you're OK to be sharing the costs of care with others (eg you're OK with insurance per se, despite its inherently collectivist nature) -- but you want to have some people and some risks excluded by the insurer to bring down your own costs of care. This appears to include people with pre-existing conditions ("making someone else pay for your problems"), young pregnant women ("pre-natal counselling"), people transitioning ("gender reassignment surgery") and no doubt a host of other people and risks. So I'd be curious to understand what your objective is in relation to those excluded people? Maybe you don't have one, and you're truly indifferent if your preferred system meant a pregnant woman died at home alone because she couldn't get insurance to cover the costs of having a baby and couldn't afford the costs out-of-pocket. As I said, I'd be curious to know your objective in relation to all excluded people, including but not limited to pregnant women.
A final comment: excluding young women from your insurance is ultimately going to drive up your own insurance costs considerably. A pool that includes men in their 50s but excludes women in their 20s and 30s will have much higher costs-of-care overall, because you're making the case-mix much more costly due to higher prevalence of cancer, CVD, diabetes etc among 50-something men cf 20/30-something women. That's the problem with insurance models: the consumer is always on the sharp end in the end. Actuaries and insurers might win, but you won't. When you need it, it won't be there for you.
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And for the avoidance of doubt, yes, health funding in different countries is indeed a topic I know quite a bit about professionally.
Re:You know why? (Score:5, Interesting)
For most of my life, a doctor visit and insurance cost almost nothing, really, just negligible.
Let me guess, you were healthy, you right-winger shitstain and dreaming about living long enough to be able to start mooching on the government Medicare dole.
For comparison, my GF got a breast cancer in 2004. She was self-employed and had personal insurance. Her company (Aetna) dropped her in 2005 in the middle of the treatments. She was not able to find any other company willing to insure her (DUH!). So she blew through her life savings (inherited from parents) on treatment and was almost forced to declare bankruptcy.
THIS is the reality of the US healthcare system pre-Obamacare. Not the experience of lucky moochers.
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Odd. How did Europe solve that dilemma?
America should have a public healthcare system (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's really easy to tell those silly Americans to just get their shit together and fix the problem you see as obvious. It requires zero effort on your part... and also accomplishes zero. If you have an actual plan for how to get the 30-50% of the voting population who thinks public healthcare is a bad idea (or who thinks it's less important than supporting their team for other reasons), I'm sure supporters of public healthcare would love to hear it. And I mean
Please calm down (Score:5, Insightful)
Practicing physician here. We have a suspected case in our medical ICU right now.
We sent samples to CDC for testing, but we could damn well run the PCR ourselves if we had to. For that matter, I personally could take a sputum sample, spin it and fix it and put it in the TEM, and make the diagnosis myself without any test kit.
The sky is not falling. We deal with stuff more contagious than this all the time. We are not laboring, even in the shite US healthcare system, under a lack of clinical information.
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The sky is not falling. We deal with stuff more contagious than this all the time.
Isn't airborne transmission the most contagious kind? Also this one seems to be contagious without any symptoms.
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How much of this is because we don't make our own? (Score:3)
Re: we are confused or plain stupid (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Run the world and ruin the world, everyone gets a turn at that. Now it's yours. We found out that it's not working, but it seems that every kid has to touch the stove once.
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China is a basket case country with a fake economy, shit school system
Ah. You've never been to China and know everything about them from Fox Noose.
China has a real economy that is far more advanced than in the US. The competition for even small things is extremely fierce in China. School system is no exception - gaokao alone puts SAT/ACT to shame.
Re: we are confused or plain stupid (Score:4, Informative)
between the tiny number of rich of the 1.5+ billion rice-poor
Nope, you were not in China. Stop lying. China has more middle-class in total than the US: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/3... [cnbc.com]
Re: we are confused or plain stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
That's easy to do when you have 1B+ people and your middle class is starting where US minimum income begins.
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Heh. You know what's funny? You sound like GM talking about the Japs in the 60s. Replace Africa with Korea and that part about an authoritarian dictatorship with a stab at a weird backwards culture in that statement and it's almost scarily close.
The Pompous President (Score:3, Informative)
Starting a trade war, cutting growth by a third, getting humiliated by North Korea, shaming the US army, letting Iran build nukes again, scuppering climate change progress, blackmailing countries to investigate his conspiracy theories about his political opponents, and attaching the judiciary & media.
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Most other countries have replaced that with civilization. Try it. Else it might actually be true that the US is the first country that went straight from barbarism to decadence without the civilization detour.
Re: Heretic! OP wants millions to die! (Score:2)
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I'd have said sarcasm, not trolling, but it's hard to tell them apart these days, I give you that.
Re: Heretic! OP wants millions to die! (Score:2)
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With HIV it was easy for him to avoid and ignore it. I mean, who'd want to fuck that creep?
Avoiding this one is harder, this time he might actually have an incentive to do something.
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In April 2009, H1N1 Became a Pandemic; 6 Months Later, After 1,000 U.S. Deaths, Obama Finally Declared it a Public Health Emergency
Posted at 3:30 pm on March 1, 2020 by Elizabeth Vaughn
In April 2009, H1N1 Became a Pandemic; 6 Months Later, After 1,000 U.S. Deaths, Obama Finally Declared it a Public Health Emergency
In April 2009, H1N1 (the swine flu) was first detected in the U.S. According to the CDC, this “virus was a unique combination of influenza virus genes never previous
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Unlikely. Even CovID has standards.
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The problem is that that exact practice becomes a multiplier. The sick worker comes to work, infects coworkers, infects customers, who in turn go to their job and infect people there.
Seriously, at this point, a more sensible health tip than buying sanitizer and masks is to avoid eating out.
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When someone offers it to you, just say no.
Hey, worked for drugs, didn't it?
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Their supply is always low. I tried 2 different stores last spring trying to buy a mask for a regular flu and ended up finding it in a different city. People think it's weird to wear a mask so there's not a lot of demand normally.