Even Walmart Thinks American Healthcare Is Too Expensive (theverge.com) 237
Walmart isn't making enough money off its new health centers, so it decided to close up shop. From a report: The retail giant announced today that it'll shutter all 51 health centers it opened up across five states since 2019. Walmart is also getting rid of its virtual care program after acquiring telehealth provider MeMD in 2021. "We determined there is not a sustainable business model for us to continue," Walmart said in an announcement today.
"This is a difficult decision, and like others, the challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs create a lack of profitability that make the care business unsustainable for us at this time," Walmart said today. It's an about-face from last year when Walmart said it planned to double its number of health clinics and expand into two new states in 2024.
"This is a difficult decision, and like others, the challenging reimbursement environment and escalating operating costs create a lack of profitability that make the care business unsustainable for us at this time," Walmart said today. It's an about-face from last year when Walmart said it planned to double its number of health clinics and expand into two new states in 2024.
Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire healthcare system in the US needs to be deconstructed and completely redone from the ground up. Get insurance companies completely out of the picture and regulate pharmaceutical companies with a heavy hand where any profit is regulated by the government. Healthcare should be a human right, not a privilege few can afford as it is in the US.
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Waiting for the argument on how the USA funds all this massive research for the rest of the countries. Hey isn't that socialism?
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Consider nationalizing it.
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Don't. It's an absolute nightmare in Canada. People are literally dying waiting in line. We are no longer allowed to have annual preventative checks. No money for it.
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No system is perfect but last i checked more people die from lack of insurance and access to care that in Canada waiting for care. (quick google estimate see is 17k Canada, 26k USA) so while that is unacceptable and needs work it doesn't speak to the fundamentals of each system.
Canada has it's problems but that is also variable because it's a province ran system, as I understand it care in places like BC and Ontario can be better than other provinces. In the US we also did that with Medicare and honestly i
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People are literally dying waiting in line.
Cool, just like in the US. Except here you get to be dead, and in debt. Bonus!
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People are literally dying waiting in line.
Cool, just like in the US. Except here you get to be dead, and in debt. Bonus!
We have private insurance companies making sure you get billed for standing in line and dying. USA! USA! WE'RE NUMBER ONE! WE'RE NUMBER ONE!
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People die in the USA because they can't afford an ambulance ride. Canada's healthcare has taken a decline because the conservative party cuts funding so their buddies who own private practices can cash in.
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Better to die while in line for treatment than on your couch with no hope for treatment.
Yes, you die in both cases. But in one of them you had a chance.
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We have that with medicare. By expanding medicare over time it would help drive down costs. Start lowering the age requirements, or lower it only for drugs. Though the anti tax people despire medicare despite them all loving the hell out of it once they're retired.
Ideology (like anti-tax zealotry) needs to be tempered by pragmatism (make people healthier).
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I am nearing retirement age and am not looking forward to handing over thousands of dollars every year for something I won't use. Over the decades of my work I've lost well over $100,000 paying for something I haven't used. Why should I do the same thing in retirement?
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What are you handing over in retirement? Medicare is cheap if you're retired and will greatly subsidize health care plans if you combine them. While working, a lot of your benefits go into health care, even though you might not see it. Sometimes an employer will deduct different amounts from your paycheck depending upon your health plan choice, which encourages the workers to avoid the expensive plans.
You might not pay directly out of your paycheck for the health care plan, which hides the true cost. If
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You realize that you can choose not to sign up for Medicare, right?
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Right, then we can have poorly-paid nurses and doctors who go on strike, like in the UK.
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Sure, let the government run it. Without privatization, there is no competition, without competition quality begins a steady but certain decline. We benefit from competition in quality, choice, and usually cost. If anything, we need more competition in the space without small players being gobbled up by the behemoths.
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What competition though? The Ambulance will take you to the closest hospital and they bill you whatever they care to bill you. If you need "Panacesq", there is one and only one manufacturer and you better pay what they want if you want to live. Where's the competition?
You want an all inclusive price for something? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Yeah,no.
If privatization is so great, why does healthcare in America cost more than double that of any other developed nation but we're in 26th place for outcomes?
Honestly
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Some decades ago, there used to be bus tours that would take people up to Canada to get meds at the ridiculously cheap rate that the Canadian government had negotiated with the Pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma in the USA found out about this and lobbied Congress t
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Sure, let the government run it. Without privatization, there is no competition
That's some funny shit. I'm bleeding out in the back of an ambulance while calling hospitals to haggle over ER prices.
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Having experienced both government-run and private health care, I can tell you that private health care sucks. Deeply.
The problem with private healthcare is that, mostly, it simply doesn't exist. There is a health services industry, that is highly motivated to sell you more services. Thus (my wife has personal experience of this), you typically don't get the best treatment available, you get the treatment that makes the most money for providers. That's what your supposed competition gets you. You get treatm
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Healthcare should be a human right, not a privilege few can afford as it is in the US.
How much healthcare should be a human right? If everyone in the country had a personal nutritionist, chef, and concierge physician, our collective health would significantly improve. If R&D expenditure into pharmaceuticals increased by an order of magnitude, we would have significantly better drugs than we will have with current spending. But someone has to pay for it.
I agree there should be some level of care that should be considered a human right, as well as some level of food and shelter. But just l
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Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire healthcare system in the US needs to be deconstructed and completely redone from the ground up. Get insurance companies completely out of the picture and regulate pharmaceutical companies with a heavy hand where any profit is regulated by the government. Healthcare should be a human right, not a privilege few can afford as it is in the US.
While I and most Americans agree, the people who disagree, people who happen to have their health completely 100% paid for by the taxpayers, congress critters, disagree because they are paid a *LOT* of money to disagree. So, what you're actually asking for is a complete dismantling of our entire government from the ground up, in order to create a government that functions for the common citizen, rather than the uber-rich who have managed to turn everything about our country into better ways to funnel all wealth from the bottom of the societal ladder upwards. It's not going to happen with our current government. The insurance industry in particular is not going to die. Any attempts to even trying to slow down their never-ending growth gets all sorts of hyperbolic responses, including accusations of trying to kill an entire job sector. Which, when you think about it, is true. We'd like to remove the "determine if this potentially life-saving procedure is going to impact profits in a negative enough manner that we would rather deny coverage" job sector. Balancing human life/health against profit should strike everyone as wrong, yet somehow you still get big segments of the population losing their minds if you dare mention turning to single-payer.
GOVERNMENT DEATH PANELS! OH NO! Because that'd be so much worse than literal for-profit death panels? Fuck off already. How about we try to pretend we're a modern society? Maybe at least give us some of the window-dressing of a society to distract us from the other ways we're being hosed over.
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Sure. Who will freeze the doctors' salaries?
Labour makes up the vast majority of the cost, and no one wants to take a pay cut.
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I agree with most of what you posted. However, this statement sounds innocuous but is really very dangerous: "Healthcare should be a human right, not a privilege few can afford"
On the one hand, yes, absolutely everyone needs healthcare. It is essential for survival, and therefore, everyone has an incentive to build a society where it is readily available.
On the other hand, healthcare comes at a cost of labor. Many, many, MANY people across many different industries must labor at full time jobs in order f
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Healthcare should be a human right
I don't know what the answer to the US healthcare expense problem is, but I do know that this sure as shit isn't it. Healthcare should not be a right in the US, nor should housing or food. A "right" to a material good means that you're taking away the rights of those that service those goods. That you are, in effect, impressing them into public servitude.
The last thing I want is a system where doctors, home builders, farmers, etc, are essentially told "You'll give your product and service to us, on demand,
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Insightful)
That's very American. You know there's no patent on insulin and why, right?
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm just a messenger. Not many people will work in medicine for free. Would you spend 20 years in school to, at the end, be a public servant? Didn't think so, me neither.
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Again, very American. We all need money, but for some cultures it is not the top priority.
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Well, we are talking about the US and American culture here, so the comments are apropos.....
So, what other cultures think or prioritize doesn't mean jack shit in this conversation....
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what other cultures think or prioritize doesn't mean jack shit in this conversation....
So, US people are unable to learn from other cultures that may be doing some things better? Yes, makes sense. You can only get _this_ deep into a mess if you are deeply ignorant.
Re: Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:3)
I live in a country with universal healthcare where I pay somewhere between 30-35% in income taxes. People on lower incomes post far less. People without a job still get coverage. Why do you think it should put average taxes up to 50%?
On the flip side, you can get rid of all the admin overhead, which is very expensive, including the people who are paid to investigate claims or find ways to deny you coverage. Also, businesses donâ(TM)t have to waste money and attention on providing coverage, which ma
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I admittedly don't know much about Medicare. I'm not quite old enough to qualify. I may qualify for it if eligible for SSDI, though. But I'm not quite there yet either.
I have a myriad of chronic medical conditions, and have not until now needed to see a doctor outside Kaiser except for emergency situations. I admit that it might be nice. But the additional cost, along with copious electronic medical records not being instantly accessible to outside providers, makes this unattractive.
I have never been lucky
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Well they're both confused. Americans aren't primarily motivated by greed, even if their bosses are. And American doctors in particular aren't primarily motivated by greed, there's better jobs for that. Polls show most Americans would prefer more time off of work rather than additional paid hours. Quitting their job is the first thing most would do if they won the lottery, and not so they could better invest the money. America may be run by the greedy but most people are just being dragged along.
As an examp
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Interesting)
Would you spend 20 years in school to, at the end, be a public servant?
We can and should attack both problems. Our residency caps are dumb, we are stupid about accepting foreign trained doctors and we also have stricter residency requirements than similar nations so those are regulatory issues we can fix.
Also nobody is seriously advocating for an NHS style system in the US, we would likely still have private doctors but even then would a doctor work as a public servant? I think yes, they would be fairly for a doctor, again nobody is advocating for a system where doctors are poor, doctor will always be a middle/upper class profession no matter where and for real I do think most doctors are doctors because they want to be doctors.
There's a reason they did that rather than finance, or MBA or data consultant or some other hot in demand profession, the fastest way to be a millionaire is not in fact being a doctor so I think there is a passion behind most of them and we should encourage and support that. The best thing we can do for doctors is help ease the administrative and excess burdens they have to bear, American doctors spend less time with patients than comparable nations because there's so much bullshit to it.
Part of the reason we have a doctor shortage is stupid school costs, high requirements and the admin bullshit. Germany has plenty of doctors despite their far more public and regulated system.
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Also nobody is seriously advocating for an NHS style system in the US
Oh, lots of people are, just not in this particular thread.
I tell them to go spend a few hours in the local VA ER waiting room and come back to me about how awesome public health care would be.
Oh how I wish I had some mod points right now, so much this. We already have fully government paid and operated health care in the United States, open to anyone who isn't a 600lb land-whale in their youth and is willing to volunteer for some free career training in the military, the VA system.
It is poorly funded, poorly operated and serves one of the most important populations in the US (those who have already DONE SOMETHING for the public to earn the benefit) exceedingly poorly. They can't compete with pri
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Informative)
Well if we are just anecdote-ing around here I can easily counter yours. My grandfather, WWII vet who recently passed adored the VA wherever he lived and refused to see private doctors, always choosing the VA and from our POV they always did the right thing by him. They did a great job at a hip replacement and after care at the ripe age of 89.
My father also eschewed VA (he was in a union so didn't need it either) for a long time but since retirement it's become his primary care and they have done great things for his probably Vietnam related COPD and actually were able to get him some mental care as well so for my family the VA has always been terrific.
I can agree the VA was bad for awhile but it's the same as any public program, if we subject to cuts and burdens and leave it dissrepair things can go south but a bunch of reforms were made and now by the numbers it's quite good or at least on par with Medicare of most private care
Trust in VA among Veteran patients rises to 91.8%, up 6% since 2018 [va.gov]
I think it says something that if you ask most people if Veterans deserve lifetime care from something like the VA they would agree wholeheartedly, they deserve it.
That means they deserve to not have to deal with the bullshit the rest of us do. Maybe nobody should have to just to you know, live well.
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That's what people say now, and as a 'Nam vet, I'm glad that they do. But take it from me, back then, large numbers of people were so against the war that they opposed veterans getting any benefits, even health care for service related conditions. That's right, they hated the war so much that they thought that those of us who were dragged of
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Re: Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:2)
No one expects them to work for free.
Doctors get paid in the UK, for example.
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No one expects them to work for free.
Doctors get paid in the UK, for example.
Not much. Which is why they have such a shortage of them [washingtonpost.com]. The more a medical system is socialized, the shittier the pay. And just as bad, where healthcare is a "human right", patients treat the workers like shit, because it's human nature to feel entitled and arrogant when this happens:
Thomas Brockwell, a junior doctor who did his training at Oxford University, is just finishing his first year of postgraduate clinical work in the UK in hopes of becoming a pediatrician. He describes his office as a three-meter-squared room that he shares with two other doctors. Between them, they have two “usable” computers and not a single unbroken chair. From midday, when the senior doctor leaves, this trio will run the ward; outside the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., they will oversee 11 wards, or some 250 patients.
“I have been spat at, punched, leered at and groped,” says Brockwell, who takes home £35,000 ($43,456) before tax, less when his “Sisyphean graduation present” of £100,000 of student debt and living expenses from six years of training are deducted.
That's shit compensation for a middling white collar office worker, let alone an MD that takes years of training. No public mandated system is ever going to attract enough doctors and nurses when they can go elsewhere for mor
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Not much. Which is why they have such a shortage of them [washingtonpost.com].
Bullshit. That is the fallout from Brexit. And it was completely predictable.
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just a messenger. Not many people will work in medicine for free.
You conflate "work for free" with "can't expect to get obscenely wealthy."
That is what's called a fallacy.
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm just a messenger. Not many people will work in medicine for free. Would you spend 20 years in school to, at the end, be a public servant? Didn't think so, me neither.
All the more reason medical education should be government funded, with provided insurance plans and industry standard pay scales for all medical titles.
They don’t have to be servants any more than they need to be rock star narcissists from a compensation perspective. Same goes for hospital administrators.
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Insightful)
If the insurance companies weren't there to siphon their administration costs and profits off the top of nearly everything spent on healthcare, the doctors could make the same amount of money while people spend less of healthcare. Hospitals and doctors offices would need less staff since they wouldn't have to do the insane billing and reimbursement procedures with dozens of different insurance providers.
I have no idea how you think insurance companies help innovation or raise salaries for doctors.
Re: Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:3)
Other countries have as good if not better Doctors than the US. Notable producers of world class doctors include S.Korea, Japan, Canada, and Germany. UK still does too but not at the level pre-Brexit.
I don't think Americans understand, we spend more than DOUBLE our peers and get less in terms of results.
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That's very American. You know there's no patent on insulin and why, right?
There had been numerous inventions in the history of mankind before capitalism took over in the early 1800's. But all those inventions led to a 0.1% annual GDP growth for the two millennia prior to 1800. Worldwide GDP growth has been 2.4% over the past 200 years, as capitalism took over the globe. And the most capitalistic countries have led the way.
Not every invention we enjoy today exist because of capitalism, but I'd argue most of them do. In my opinion modern technology wouldn't even be where it was in
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That's very American. You know there's no patent on insulin and why, right?
There had been numerous inventions in the history of mankind before capitalism took over in the early 1800's. But all those inventions led to a 0.1% annual GDP growth for the two millennia prior to 1800. Worldwide GDP growth has been 2.4% over the past 200 years, as capitalism took over the globe. And the most capitalistic countries have led the way.
Not every invention we enjoy today exist because of capitalism, but I'd argue most of them do. In my opinion modern technology wouldn't even be where it was in 1900 if Europeans hadn't started spreading this economic system across the globe a few hundred years ago.
Worship of capitalism is keeping us from moving on from it. I'm sure some of the systems in place prior to capitalism were thought of as the bees knees as well. Society grows, ideals change, and we must change with them. I think it's time we look at capitalism as one tool in the toolbox, and not the overruling god of all things always forever and ever, amen. It's one aspect of a functional society, but it can't exist exclusively as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. Healthcare is one place where I fee
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's why low-risk, low-reward businesses such as grocery stores don't exist.
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How many years of college do you need again to work at a grocery store?
Re: Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:2)
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Plenty of professions and businesses existed before the advent of capitalism. Not every business is going to be a driver of economic growth. Most are just providing basic goods and services. But these companies do not drive R&D spending. Without the profit motive of capitalism the world would likely go back to the 0.1% annual GDP growth we had before capitalism came along.
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Did capitalism create the Internet?
Could capitalism have created the Internet?
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And that's why low-risk, low-reward businesses such as grocery stores don't exist.
There are many current news stories of grocery stores, pharmacies and other retailers closing up shop in inner cities across the United States where crime is high and the local administrations won't do anything useful to bring it down. Grocery stores also rarely sell only groceries, as the margins on cabbage and chicken is too thin to keep the lights on in most places.
Another consideration is that the prerequisite for most jobs at a grocery store is possession of a pulse. I'm not sure I would trust the bag-
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I don't think most people getting into medical school are solely interested in money. That's part of it but the work involved in becoming a doctor is pretty high, there are easier professions if you are smart enough to make it through medical school but just want money. Doctors tend to enjoy the work and good doctors should be well compensated.
Nobody is advocating for a system where medical professionals are not paid fairly for their work, the system that is a right fit for a America is more than likely a
Re:Healthcare should not be a profit center (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet, many many other countries manage just fine. Are you implying that America is the only country in the world with great health care, and the reason for the great health care is that most people can't afford it?
Here are some of the competitive processes drug makers use: When a drug is ready to have its patent expire, they devise a slightly different formulation, perhaps adding an anti-nausea component, then market this patented drug to the doctors so that they prescribe the new expensive one instead of the now patent-free version. Doctors rarely know the cost of the drugs, they are mostly following highly biased marketing literature.
Drug prices vary wildly for the same product, depending upon your insurance or health plan. I have $10 copay for all drugs, off of a very affordable HMO plan. But some for-profit insurance plans want to recoup all the costs or don't negotiate drug prices as well. So some entities negotiate well, others do not. The "competitive" market means lots of small players trying to get good prices for drugs, whereas big players like Medicare negotiate much better. Having a single player would drive down prices and keep them in check.
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Had a coworker who moved to Finland for a job with his wife for a couple of years. They had a baby, it was all paid for, *including* prenatal care and checkups (some insurance plans in US limit these). Didn't cost a cent to them. Granted tax rate is high, and yet no one bitches about it like they bitch about the low tax rate in America, because they can see the benefits from the taxes.
Health care is a hit or miss even with nationalized systems. In America they like to point to Canada, as if it's the one
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I am a veteran so I can use the Veteran's Administration hospitals. Some suck, others do not. I imagine that that is the way it is most p;aces, though I can honestly say that my two experiences with the UK NHS were both positive. I have had minimal experience with Spain's healthcare system and Belgium's and both of those work fine. I believe that most European countries have nationalized healthcare and you don't hear much in the way of negative press from the Scandinavian countries or anyone o
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I was waiting at my gf's lobby for her to get off work and felt a weird feeling in my chest so I called an Uber and was at the hospital and hooked up to a machine talking to a heart specialist about10 minutes later.
I was not having a heart attack.
Fee: zero.
And?
These sort of anecdotes are pointless when discussing national policy.
Yes sir, this exactly. Same experience for me, my wife had tightness in her chest and trouble breathing, straight to the hospital, straight to a bed, tests, heartburn. No bill, we have insurance because I work a normal job.
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Yes sir, this exactly. Same experience for me, my wife had tightness in her chest and trouble breathing, straight to the hospital, straight to a bed, tests, heartburn. No bill, we have insurance because I work a normal job.
This is pure BS. I suspect you don't actually work in the USA. Perhaps you are just a foreign troll.
Almost no one in the US has insurance that doesn't have co-pays or deductibles. Even the best plan available to members of congress has deductibles and copays that would apply to the incident you described.
There is another possibility: you had already spent thousands of dollars for health care that year and had met your out of pocket maximum. Thousands of dollars that make your anecdote irrelevant.
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I do, and I don't. My healthcare is through the VA, and whether or not there's a co-pay or not depends on what it's for. I have a number of long-term conditions with a co-pay on the medicines needed to control them, but everything I get from them for my diabetes, my hearing issues and my non-h lymphoma are 100% free because they're all service connected. Not only that, back in '22, I slipped on some black ice, came down on
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My healthcare is through the VA
So you have socialized healthcare. You didn't pay nothing because of your insurance; you paid nothing because of your eligibility for VA healthcare. What was the point you were trying to make?
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In your original post, you stated that your wife had a stay in hospital, for which you received no bill, which you said was due to having insurance through your job. That simply wasn't true.
And, yes, you might not like it, but VA healthcare is socialized healthcare, especially as it provides coverage for for your wife.
Your own story contradicts the point you were trying to make (badly).
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No bill, we have insurance because I work a normal job.
I call bullshit, on both you and OP. I've had a number of various insurances over the years, some were better, some were worse. Every single one, without exception, had some sort of cost sharing: Deductibles, co-insurances, copays, or some combination of the three. I currently set aside $2,500/year in a Flex spending account to cover those cost-sharing portions, which I blew through within six months. I feel obligated to point out, even though it's not really relevant to the conversation, that out-of-po
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Are you implying that America is the only country in the world with great health care, and the reason for the great health care is that most people can't afford it?
No to the first part of the sentence, there is decent health care in many parts of the world for the well connected. As to the second statement, at the risk of being crass, I would say that yes, of course that is obviously true.
There is not an unlimited supply of excellent doctors, excellent facilities and excellent support staff. They are expensive to train, hire and retain. Of course access to those is greater for those with resources, how else would you expect it to be?
A couple centuries back the people
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At least there's a few slashdotters with common sense. I was afraid the hipster 20-somethinigs were the only ones here.
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Every other non-warzone country in the world has this figured out, and has generally had it figured out for a very long time: Healthcare must be operated as a public resource, not a private profit center. But the HMO parasite is deeply, deeply embedded in America and it damned well won't go without a fight.
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Well, American here....I'll say "No:Yes" in answer to you here.
As others have mentioned, for an example of how well the federal govt in the US runs healthcare, just look at the VA system.
No thank you, I would NOT want to depend on that system for my healthcare...I'm doing MUCH better now with things as they are, even as scre
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Without greed and the chance for great rewards, nobody of any quality will enter the field.
People who won't enter a field where their greed says they can't get obscenely rich certainly have a quality, but one cannot help but wonder if it's a desirable quality or an anti-social psychosis.
When greed rules the industry, people who are motivated by a sincere desire to server their fellow man will avoid it. That's where we are now.
And Slashdot, of all places, knows how unlikely people driven by money - MBA types - are to understand the technical side of a business.
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Without greed and the chance for great rewards, nobody of any quality will enter the field. It'll go back to the quality of service you got when churches were the doctors office. Greed runs the world, like it or not, that's how it is.
Or to put it more politely, people respond to incentives. Bettering your life circumstances by getting paid a lot is a very strong incentive. Doing good for others is relatively weak.
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Perfectly said. Thank you.
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I guess we do not have quality healthcare in Europe then that everybody has access to. Oh, wait, we have.
Not everybody is scum motivated by greed. In fact, a society can run entirely fine without greed and greed is what destroys things.
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Without greed and the chance for great rewards, nobody of any quality will enter the field. It'll go back to the quality of service you got when churches were the doctors office. Greed runs the world, like it or not, that's how it is.
That's what you think, but America doesn't top the quality of care charts. Quality of care is perfectly fine and in some cases better in countries with very heavily regulated public health systems.
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Of course the entirety of the rest of the first world shows that you're not correct but dont let that slow you down!
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Invented that transplant system all by yourselves eh? Invent the plastics technology to do it safely? Electricity too? Good stuff, I'm happy for your country. Must be awesome where you are.
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The Founders could not imagine the medical advances and system that developed in the mid 20th century but that's why they gave us the ability and responsibility to adapt the constitution.
My opinion is they would agree with you and if they would probably be appalled at the outcomes of our medical system constrasted with the wealth we possess and ask why we haven't been amending things. (at least some of them would, they were not a monolith of thought which is why the system is flexible, things change)
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Speaking of responsibility. Do you think they would have imagined we'd have people 500 pounds or addicted to smoking/alcohol to cause 60% of the medical catastrophes? Maybe the responsible thing to do would be to deny self harm from subsidized medical care.
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Speaking of responsibility. Do you think they would have imagined we'd have people 500 pounds or addicted to smoking/alcohol to cause 60% of the medical catastrophes? Maybe the responsible thing to do would be to deny self harm from subsidized medical care.
Better yet, why not just kill everyone at birth who has a disability. Need glasses? Get gasses. That ought to really drive down costs... /s
In reality it will end up costing you more to put together programs to test and deny people than it would to just treat them. Its the same with drug testing welfare recipients.
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You're doing the thing, you are scribing monolithic thoughts to a pretty varied group of people. Their inability to agree on everything is why we have the system today. Many of the founders were in fact pro tax in some form (the rallying cry was "no taxation without representation", can't forget the second half)
Socialism also wasn't even a word or a concept so let's toss that aside.
" To facilitate to them the performance of their duty it is essential that you should practically bear in mind that toward t
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The founding fathers gave Congress the power to tax in order to provide for the general welfare of the United States.
High costs are so systemic (Score:4, Informative)
The US medical industry is so broken even massive companies like Walmart have trouble jumping in and finding ways to extract high enough profits to make the work worthwhile. Health insurance administration is too costly, pharmaceuticals and providers are too expensive, insurance coverage is complicated and often insufficient, and people generally expect any new procedure or drug should be available to them regardless of the price. While I believe a single payer program must be part of the solution, it will be nowhere close to solving the whole problem.
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Translation (Score:3)
We couldn't find a way to buy it from China and sell it to high-maintenance suburban moms.
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Too bad more corporations don't have this mindset: finding ways to provide good (or good enough) products at a reasonable price.
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Article Title Is VERY wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Article Title Is VERY wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh how cute, you think the ACA is the cause of America's obscene healthcare costs. Hint: your country has been the punchline of jokes about healthcare cost for well over a generation. The ACA may have moved some numbers around, but ultimately not even remotely the cause of America's healthcare problems.
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According to Star Trek, AI doctors are fine as long as you don't beam into remote areas or convince doc they are an opera star.
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According to Star Trek, AI doctors are fine as long as you don't beam into remote areas or convince doc they are an opera star.
I never quite understood why they didn't clone the original doctor image and spin up a few dozen more of them. There were several stories that touched on this, but not to my satisfaction. Even if the clones had to start from scratch, they'd be perfectly reasonable nurses and assistants, and if they left them running they should eventually wind up as complex as the Dr. I think there were even a few holodeck sims that ended up gaining sentience, so they left them running (or because they did?).
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Re:An image problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Since many corporations have a net profit of less than 5%, you've just put virtually all small, family owned business out of business and rendered tens of millions of people out of work.
Your mother must be proud.