US healthcare. Is this the reality?

[Sue U]

Weather for Tuesday, April 27, 2010 (NBC-LA).

Ya got me on the medical/dental thing, though. Damn! Snookered again by the lamestream media!

[Gob]

CBS) This segment was originally broadcast on March 2, 2008. It was updated on July 9, 2008.

One of the decisive issues in the presidential campaign is likely to be health care. Some 47 million Americans have no health insurance, and that's just the start: millions more are underinsured, unable to pay their deductibles or get access to dental care.

Recently, 60 Minutes heard about an American relief organization that airdrops doctors and medicine into the jungles of the Amazon. It's called Remote Area Medical, or "RAM" for short.

As correspondent Scott Pelley first reported last March, Remote Area Medical sets up emergency clinics where the needs are greatest. But these days that's not the Amazon. This charity founded to help people who can't reach medical care finds itself throwing America a lifeline.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/ ... 9496.shtml

"You created this medical organization designed to go into Third World countries to go into remote places, and now doing 60 percent of your work in urban and rural America, what are we supposed to make of that?" Pelley asked Brock.

"For the 50 million or so people in this country, the one thing that is on their mind is 'What if I have a catastrophic event, a car crash, a heart attack,'" he replied. "'Because I either have no health insurance or I'm underinsured.' And, so this is a very, very weighty thing to be thinking about, knowing that your family is in great jeopardy."

[Long Run]

I was never suggesting that there was not an effort like this to take care of people who fall between the cracks for whatever reason. However, for the benefit of our foreign friends, this article is hardly representative of healthcare in America, even for the poor or almost poor.

[@meric@nwom@n]

I was never suggesting that there was not an effort like this to take care of people who fall between the cracks for whatever reason. However, for the benefit of our foreign friends, this article is hardly representative of healthcare in America, even for the poor or almost poor.

I would agree with LR, it is not typical.

[Gob]

That it exists, or is needed, in the "greatest nation in the world ", is a good point of debate though?

[@meric@nwom@n]

You can debate whatever you wish, but you asked so you are being told, this story is not typical of what is going on over here.

[Long Run]

Yes, mostly, in dental we have dentists who put their wards to sleep and have funny sex with them, and doctors are either heroic or always checking out the nurses. But then I get my view from network television.

[Gob]

You can debate whatever you wish, but you asked so you are being told, this story is not typical of what is going on over here.

"Typical" no. "Needed", by some. A sad endightment of the US health care system?

[Gob]

Slideshow of the clinic in the sports stadium from the OP

[BoSoxGal]

A sad indictment, even.

Given what we spend on healthcare in the US, it's just more proof that we are more class-stratified in the area of access to basic human rights than all other developed nations due to the lack of univeral single-payer healthcare.

1/6 of our population isn't insured. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm sure many millions more have deductibles so high, they can't budget true preventive routine care on their salaries - salaries already reduced by the cost of that ridiculous, nearly useless, 'insurance'.

I hope I live to see single-payer in the US. I hope to see it very soon.

eta: I'm guessing your spelling of endightment is recognized equally in British English, Gob. No offense intended!

[dales]

I hope I live to see single-payer in the US. I hope to see it very soon.

Perhaps when B.O.'s plan to land men/women on the planet Mars.

Don't hold your breath.

btw: I didn't have health ins. to well into my 30's......so this so many million uninsured is so much political clap trap.

D'ya thing it's because they chose NOT to have it?

My son in law owns his own business, he and his family are NOT insured and I don't hear him pissing and moaning b/c they don't have gubmint healthcare.

[Gob]

BSG, it's a new word I've invented, a cross between inditement and indictment.

[Econoline]

A few years ago they thought I was having a heart attack. While being treated some moron from the billing office came down and started bothering me for a $100 copay????

Almost exactly the same thing happened to my wife one Sunday afternoon a few months ago (except that the co-pay was $250, IIRC). They did wait until she was examined and tested and was about to be released (it wasn't a heart attack after all but she had had similar symptoms a few years ago and it turned out to have really been a heart attack then, so we erred on the side of caution this time)--and then a hospital representative showed up and apologetically but firmly asked for immediate payment. I was in the room with her at the time and was able to provide a credit card...I'm not sure what would have happened if neither of us was in a position to pay right then and there. (Billing us later was not presented as an option, but I imagine that's what would have been done if that were the only option.)

[Gob]

Absolutely shocking Beaglz & Econoline!

[BoSoxGal]

Gob, I actually did a Google search and found many entries with 'endightment' - some UK, some Oz based. I'm guessing it's an older version of the word from British English, so you are spot on using it.

As to the issue of insurance; I had student insurance for many years, from age 20 through 30. I remained very ill with a variety of symptoms that greatly reduced my quality of life and productivity during that time period because patient cost to test/treat the underlying condition was so incredibly prohibitive, especially for a student. Young people aren't all so robustly healthy that they stay out of the insurance/health care equation; some of them are so limited in resources that they can't get the preventive care that would help them to be more functionally productive members of the economic scheme.

We all pay the price of an uninsured/underinsured citizenry. I am going to be 40 this year; I hope very much to see an established single-payer system in the US well before I die. I think the problematic reforms just passed will serve to highlight to the American taxpayer just how much further reform is necessary.

[Econoline]

Gob, I actually did a Google search and found many entries with 'endightment' - some UK, some Oz based. I'm guessing it's an older version of the word from British English, so you are spot on using it.

I'm guessing it was invented by some bloke who's lived in both the UK and Oz and spends a lot of time online...


...so you're still spot on using it.

[Big RR]

I think the problematic reforms just passed will serve to highlight to the American taxpayer just how much further reform is necessary.

I wish I had your optimism; I still think the system is going to prove to be so inet and costly that people will vote in droves to keep government out of healthcare. Isincerely hope that I'm wrong, but it still seems to me that it would be difficult to find a system more tailored to lead to this end.

[Gob]

It's a rock and a hard place situation. Too much reform and no one will stand for it, too little and it's too ineffective to make a difference.

The lunatic right win on both counts, and the US stays with a manifestly unfair system.