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  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: deficiT | tryptakid | Foreigner

Healthcare Isn't A Free Market: It's A Giant Economic Scam

not free excactly, but let me explain. if you have insurance (and most people have one, because it's obligated), necessary treatments are covered. for some things you still have to pay a share, but nothing serious. for example, my sister had to stay in the hospital for like 2 weeks because of a serious infection and had to pay about 200 euros for that (that was for the bed and food, etc.).

so while not everything is for free, it is not nearly as bad as in the USA.
 
Anyone who doesn't believe in universal healthcare has to get their stupid head out of their ass right now and stop listening to O'reilley or whatever the fuck that fucker's name is and needs to generally cease tuning in to the most bought-out political party since just before the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
 
This story belongs in every major magazine, newspaper and documentary expose on this topic in the US.

SarcasticOne said:
Jeez that sucks because the thread is about ridiculously high medical costs.

I'll share my story:

At 23 I started a painting business here in New Hampshire. I started from scratch, with nothing, but I did well and put $140,000.00 through my checking account in the first year. I was working pretty much all day every day, and at the same time was experiencing some serious back pain. After numerous trips to the ER and a doctor, I was diagnosed with spinal stenosis, degenerative disc disease, arthritis, and a disc herniation. I had no insurance, so any type of procedure would have been out of pocket, and since I had already been diagnosed insurance wouldn't cover it anyway because it's considered a preexisting condition.

If I had taken the time off to do a procedure (surgery) then I would have lost my business and wouldn't be able to pay the bills anyway. So what did I do? Yup, you guessed it, I got hooked on pain medication. At least I could still work and make money, which was useful because after 3 years I was taking so much, it started to cost me around $800 for oxycontin, $90 for oxycodone, and $150 for the doctor visit (pain center) EACH MONTH. These were valid prescriptions by the way.

After a while the addiction took control of my life, and it wasn't about the pain anymore, it was about the pills. You know the story, taking too many, selling some to pay for the script, running out early and having to pay 4 times as much on the street as from the pharmacy. I tried to go to a rehab, but there are VERY FEW in NH, and every one I called had that question everyone hates: "What type of insurance do you have"? Well when I said that I didn't, they would give me the number of "a place that might help someone in your situation". Well I called every place, and actually made a full circle back to the first place I called. No help there.

Well one day I decided I didn't feel like paying for the prescription (actually I didn't have the money) and I did what any normal citizen would do in my situation. I put a ski mask on and robbed the pharmacy. (a different one that i didn't go to regularly thanks). Well I got caught and was sent to prison for 4 years. Not cool.

After a couple years in the prison my pain got so bad that I couldn't walk without the help of a cane, I couldn't do anything, sit, stand, lie down, shave, shower, etc. I finally got the medical staff to realize I wasn't just faking it for pills, and they realized it with the help of mri's and x-rays. All at the state's expense. And finally last March I had a spinal fusion (L4+L5) while incarcerated, again all at the state's expense. Just amazing how much the surgery helped me, I'm able to do just about everything I used to be able to do.

So in the end, I did get a much needed operation, I stopped the medication, and am generally doing ok. But my life is so fucked because now I'm a felon. I just wish at the beginning, I could have somehow got the operation done and not got addicted to pills.
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^hell, it could even make a solid film.


one question: when going for some blood tests as recommended by a medical practitioner, who has ever had a list of options for the service to use, along with their corresponding prices provided to them prior to deciding which lab would perform the tests?


....
*crickets chirp*

...
sure, "free market" indeed.
 
^ It is, though. You're 'free' to pay for healthcare, or you're 'free' to die a horribly painful death.

Ahhh, freedom!
 
fair enough.
i especially like this freedom to choose while i'm unconscious. that's particularly neat.

if you've got freedom and you don't know it, clap your hands

seriously though, all them easterners are jealous of our western advance "life at all cost" policies, especially green are the youth in asia.
*boom-tish*
 
Joeof1 said:
I see that coming up with your own conclusion based on little questioning and evidence leads you to assume a lot of things that you possibly could not know, and that is further from reality than you seem to understand. I have no vested interest whether you lose your leech based system. You have no clue where I am even moving to, nor why.
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This is exactly what you do. Are you sure you're thinking about me? Or do you just lack any sliver of self-consciousness? But in all seriousness, you did admit that you would leave the United States if the welfare system collapsed because of the circumstances surrounding said collapse. Where would you move to btw? Another nation which had an intact welfare system?


If it were basic you would understand the argument for both came from Socrates, and he was essentially stating that Societies are groups of individuals that gather in their own self-interest where as the State (nation-state for him) was a parasitic system that formed to abuse those said societies at the behest of the privileged class.
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Are you honestly following a train of thought? Do you know why you're arguing what you're arguing? Do you understand what point I was making? Please re-read.

Maybe I should point out that I have been using the specific letter representation of myself that we identify as I quite regularly in this thread. In fact the post above you noticeably side stepped the comment where it was most prominent. You conveniently ignored it for some reason. I would venture because it has something to do with you trying to avoid confronting the actual argument, and assuming that you try to make this about me personally that I will drop the issue and quit poking holes in your position, so you can continue to lament stealing the wealth of other people without someone pointing out the consequences that will follow.
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Okay, so then you are going to stop making assumptions about who it is you are discussing with and instead speak of the topic at hand? This is good news.
 
Joeof1 said:
No it isn't. Society is for voluntary co-operation, not so that you can put your burdens onto me. Society is merely the description of those that gather for like interest. What you are saying is that it's a form of socialism, it is not.
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It is.. It absolutely is. Your first clue should be the word, "society". Capitalism has and always will rest on the bedrock of socialism that houses both the physical and constitutional infrastructure of a nation.

The banks didn't cause the crash.
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No, they just enabled it, stuffing money in bags along the way, hedging on when it would happen. Let's give banks a free pass on this one.. Nevermind, we already did.

Leveraging anything is stupid idea. Leveraging means you are not saving.
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You seem to want to save money. That's nice. If you get hit by a train tomorrow, a bunch of people will be delighted that you saved so much money for them to spend. So let's assume that saving is good and you manage to save $100k. Then one day you get sick, your insurance company drops the ball and you're stuck with a bill for $100k. Do you deserve to exhaust your entire savings on a surgery and medication? Under a single payer system, both the rich and the poor are covered and it's cheaper per person.
 
Ho-Chi-Minh said:
Anyone who doesn't believe in universal healthcare has to get their stupid head out of their ass right now and stop listening to O'reilley or whatever the fuck that fucker's name is and needs to generally cease tuning in to the most bought-out political party since just before the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
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I concur.
 
As a part of my work, I deliver drugs... mostly to nursing homes. I have delivered one single "senna" package with just a very tiny amount of pills. Maybe even 2. This was delivered 2 hours away. I was paid 120 dollars, which was a commission off of what my company was paid (probably 20 percent more than that 120). They could have sent a nurse not five miles down the road to a gas station to buy a bottle for a dollar.

But it doesn't work that way...

I wonder how much the insurance was marking those couple of laxatives for.

I myself have no insurance. I have had diarrhea for a month, because of a dysfunctional gallbladder which probably needs removed, and I survive on hemp seeds mainly, because I have so many food allergies.

My main point with the senna deal is that they have the money to pay a guy like me 120 bucks to deliver it. The centralization both harms and helps.
 
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Nobody chooses to be struck down by illness or accident, health care should be provided according to one's need for it rather than their ability to pay for it. I think the psychological cost on society must be huge. It's surely a big cultural thing. I imagine for Americans, the financial implications of illness or accident are a tremendous worry and insanely stressful on millions of people. No Canadian could relate to that feeling, you know that if something happens you'll be looked after, and that's it. Or the social cost of people neglecting to access health care resources due to the cost. So minor things turn into major things.

The only reality about US health care is that if you're rich you can access better health care services than pretty much anywhere else on Earth, if you're not, you're either a middle class person worrying about how your insurance company will try to screw you when something does happen, or you just don't have any and you don't go to the doctor at all and if something happens you'll be bankrupt.
 
the first day, many years ago, that i saw my acupuncturist, was the last day i ever thought of conventional, Western healthcare as any means of balancing or maintaining my health.

a hospital is kind of like a feedlot factory farm, but with people instead of cows and toxic chemicals instead of gmo soy and corn.
 
The government should place limits on how much hospitals can charge for procedures, prescription drugs, and overnight stays. I got a $56,000 hospital bill for two nights' stay in Florida which involved no procedures. That is absurd. Obamacare does nothing to control costs. Simply requiring everyone to buy health insurance is not the correct answer. Insurance is not a magical solution. Doctors and hospitals in the US charge too much, and they should be forced to charge less. It's highway robbery at the moment.
 
Rate Shock: In California, Obamacare To Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums By 64-146%

Last week, the state of California claimed that its version of Obamacare’s health insurance exchange would actually reduce premiums. “These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard,” boasted Peter Lee, executive director of the California exchange. But the data that Lee released tells a different story: Obamacare, in fact, will increase individual-market premiums in California by as much as 146 percent.

“The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market,” the state said in a press release, “ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions.”

That’s the sentence that led to all of the triumphant commentary from the left. “This is a home run for consumers in every region of California,” exulted Peter Lee.

Except that Lee was making a misleading comparison. He was comparing apples—the plans that Californians buy today for themselves in a robust individual market—and oranges—the highly regulated plans that small employers purchase for their workers as a group. The difference is critical.

If you’re a 25 year old male non-smoker, buying insurance for yourself, the cheapest plan on Obamacare’s exchanges is the catastrophic plan, which costs an average of $184 a month. (By “average,” I mean the median monthly premium across California’s 19 insurance rating regions.)

The next cheapest plan, the “bronze” comprehensive plan, costs $205 a month. But in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com (NASDAQ:EHTH), the median cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92.

In other words, for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoking Californian, Obamacare will drive premiums up by between 100 and 123 percent.

Under Obamacare, only people under the age of 30 can participate in the slightly cheaper catastrophic plan. So if you’re 40, your cheapest option is the bronze plan. In California, the median price of a bronze plan for a 40-year-old male non-smoker will be $261.

But on eHealthInsurance, the median cost of the five cheapest plans was $121. That is, Obamacare will increase individual-market premiums by an average of 116 percent.
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Calif-rate-shock-graph.png


Keep one thing in mind though, this is not applicable to people with lower incomes as they get subsidized. I'm curious what the rates will be in other states.
 
Say what? There's no way 25 year olds are going to pay that.

No wonder the insurance industry supported Obamacare.
 
I find it strange that people talk about the American medical system like it is a free market. It is arguably the most heavily regulated and state-run part of the economy. I'm not sure if there is any developed country in the world with anything close to a free market in health care. The same thing applies to the finance industry as well.


As a side note, it is important to realize that health care and health insurance are not the same thing.
 
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