It's Long Past Time We Had Universal Healthcare In The US

Among many, many other reasons, shit like this needs to stop happening:

Louisville Hospital Reportedly Dumping Patients On The Sidewalk

Source: https://www.wave3.com/2023/06/29/it...ters-investigate-patient-dumping-allegations/

I am certain this happens on the regular, not just in Louisville, but in many hospitals around the country. Our for-profit healthcare system extracts the money it can from people and their insurance, and then drops them on the sidewalk.

We know it happens because even insurance agencies have a term for it:
https://www.irmi.com/term/insurance-definitions/patient-dumping

And even if that's not enough, good ol' CBS had video of this happening back in 2018:


The claim is that they are fined if caught, but the fine doesn't actually address the problem, just like fines against dangerous polluting corporations rarely amounts to anything more than a slap on the wrist. When you're pulling in millions and billions, a few thousand dollars is just the price of doing business.

While this has happened, on and off, since private hospitals were a thing, it should be evidence that we, as a society, deserve better than this. No one should be at risk of being dumped on the sidewalk because they can't pay for care.

But if we don't raise our children to want to be bloodthirsty insurance predators, they won't have any gumption, and will open flower stands.

I spent 15 years up against the US insurance and hospital systems. They will drain the life right out of you, and put the lives of your loved ones in danger over a handful of dollar bills.

Thanks for a huge gift to the insurance companies Joe Biden.

That's a fair point, but I'd also add that it's not really his fault on this one. This is an issue that goes back decades. Where other countries adopted universal and singlepayer healthcare, the US insurance companies fought it tooth and nail. I honestly lay 90% of the blame on Reagan and his policies. Yes, the GOP and the Democrats have fucked around with the edges trying to either add a little or take more away, but as a whole we've had a progressively shittier system since.

So do you want something done about health insurance, or do you want to make excuses for one of the guys who gave the gift of taxpayer funded private insurance?

We are never getting UHC or a single payer option with Joe. HJe is not even talking about it. He is not even trying to fix what has been done to Obamacare because he likes that it has been corrupted. He likes that the insurance company can take your payments and then autodeny your claims. This is his vision. You pay for the illusion that you will get healthcare. That was Joe's plan all along and why 4 more years will mean 4 more years nothing will get done because he would veto any change even if the dems somehow voted something through.

It should not even be called insurance if you allow them to deny your coverage. Then it is just paying some company for nothing.

Thank you Joe Fucking Biden for Obamacare. It is his fault as fucking president useless shitbag. We could have had Bernie or Warren. At least they would have tried something.

The Democrats aren't going to do anything about healthcare. Too many of them take donations from insurance companies and their "health partners." If I believed they would, then I'd try to work through them, but all we're going to get is what we've been getting, tiny pushes along the outer edges that won't address the core problem.

It's kind of a perfect setup. You get the GOP who wouldn't give two shits if women died in forced childbirth having babies they didn't want, and you have a big swathe of Democrats who prefer to keep the status quo that isn't really serving anyone but health corporations and the insurance industry. There are third parties, like the Green Party, who do want singlepayer healthcare, but our duopoly has essentially shut them out in every way they can, including pushing them off ballots.

You seem to take my dismissal of Joe Biden being the source of the problem as being apologia, when it isn't. I don't like Joe Biden, and I think he's done more harm to the poor, to the marginalized, and to the working class over the past 50 years than any other modern Democrat in office. What I'm saying is that pointing this out doesn't solve anything, because at this point people either know, and they think there's no other option, or they don't care because they have enough insulating them from the worst of the policies being pushed off as "successes."

It's like Bidenomics. Anyone who has the smallest iota of what is going on knows that it's bullshit, that it's mostly a branding push to make it seem like real, material change is taking place when it isn't. Again, moving around the edges of the problem without addressing them, because the Democrats benefit from the problem. The GOP's the same way, but then again the GOP just makes a new problem when they need to energize their voters, like when they started the whole LGBTQ = Groomers thing.

Back on subject, though, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are going to make actual, marked, significant change that addresses the heart of the problem. They'll nibble around the edges, but the status quo benefits them heavily as it is. The PPACA seemed like a great idea, and parts of it were good, like the Medicaid Expansion, but even it was cobbled together from a Heritage Foundation medical care plan that had the support of Mitt Romney at one point (though he now says he never endorsed it, but that's standard procedure). It still falls far, far, FAR shorter than what we need, and is mostly a benefit to the insurance companies than it is a help to the average person, especially as our healthcare needs grow.

The only way we're getting single payer healthcare, aside from just overturning the entire system and rebuilding it from the ground up, is to take big chunks out of the lobbying industry and change how congress can interact with their non-individual donors. That requires a repeal of Citizens United, for starters. It can be done, but I'm not sure the people of this country have the stomach to do it, because it requires looking at their own parties and realizing that most of the people who are in office truly do not give a fuck about them, and that our entire political system has been riding on the aesthetic of good governance the past 75 years, with the last 40 being a dead run for the social and economic cliff, rather than actually creating material change.

Joe Biden is certainly a part of the problem, but he's only a small part in the grand scheme of it. There are so many filthy hands involved. US citizens need to regain their fortitude and tell their leaders that they're tired of this shit, and they're not going to take it anymore, and to do that by withholding what we have: our labor, our votes, and our financial consent. Until we actually do this, these politicians have no motivation to do anything other than keep making bank off of our misery.

Lobbying is not going anywhere. POTUS loves it on both sides. The legislature is bought and sold on both sides. Now we find out every member of SCOTUS thinks they are above any ethics regulations and supposed to take as many bribes as possible because they are above the law. So if we had a miracle and the legislature and President passed something Alito to KBJ would kill it unanimously because money=speech.

we are generations away from a SCOTUS that would not fuck us all for the people buying them vacations and houses. we will never have a POTUS that is above it. We might get a couple of new legislators who will never hold a majority, and most of them will do a Sinema for the big bucks as soon as they are elected. Even AOC has gone onto performance tweeting while she doesn't do a thing. How long did the justice dems last until they became the regular old dems? The tea party might have lasted longer.

We cannot even get regulations that insurance companies have to fulfill their contracts to their customers and pay their portion of medical bills they are supposed to. They can just refuse every payment and then you have to fight them while your credit is destroyed for years.

It would be more likely we crash the whole medical insurance industry by every person just quitting health insurance, which would be a death sentence for so many.

It is not happening. We had our chance in the Obama years for something and we got what we deserve because America loves eating shit and pretending it is awesome. This is why our government sucks. When each side believes their side is good and the cure for the problem we are all wrong and will never get anything.

It is better that a thousand people die in the gutter than any tax dollars go towards healthcare.

This is what the fuckwits actually believe.

Our tax dollars do go to health insurance, and if they ever failed the fed would bail them out despite the reality the tax subsidies go much more to CEO pay than it does to providing any healthcare under Obamacare.

The reality is americans would much rather pay insurance company executive salaries and bonuses because they all think socialism of medicine is bad. The real death panels we should worry about are the corporate ones because they will kill you for a fraction of a cent.

No. Give us a public option. I’m also not completely against UHC, but I need to see how it’s actually implemented.

Public option is a bad idea under our current healthcare system. You would have to do a drastic overhaul on the limitations of the private healthcare system, otherwise the private system would shunt all of its poor patients to the public system, and the congresscritters getting paid by insurance companies will push bills to limit funding to the public system, resulting in a shitty public system, which the people who caused the problem will proclaim it can't work in the US, at which point congress will "solve" the problem by privatizing even more healthcare.

I'd say that seems like a simplified parody, but some of our posters here in the past have literally stated exactly that, they would rather a private system that costs more and has worse outcomes than a more efficient public one, because a public program doing well would set a precedent.

People have been convinced it's "socialism." The fact is that, in the US, our healthcare is directly tied to our employment. If you lose your job, you lose your medical coverage unless you can pay $1,000+ a month for COBRA (that's just the premium). Our system relies on cheap domestic labor where extremely cheap foreign labor can't be used, hence why our minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour. Anyone who would have this put upon them now would see it as absolutely absurd, ridiculous, an insult to basic human decency, but because we have been conditioned towards this since the Reagan era, people will literally cheer for their oppression. It's a clusterfuck, to put it mildly.

Edit to add: Now, that being said, universal healthcare is supported by the majority of the US, but it goes back to what I said before: if congress actually made it happen, insurance companies and healthcare providers that benefit from the current system would fight back, and they have fuckloads of money, and our politicians aren't interested in actually changing anything beyond what they do at the edges.

I have to disagree here. If you could get a public option that would mean something had fundamentally changed in congress. It is simply not happening in the congress we have. If we were to get to that point it would have to mean the people had started to make a very real demand for reform again.

If you did get a public option it would be huge as people would fall into it. This would give the government power to demand discounts for it's mass of patients. The doctors would also be forced to take government patients more than right now because you would not just have medicaid and medicare patients being on their own. The public option would be the most powerful option. The insurance companies would roll along with supplemental coverage.

The reality is a congress that would create a public option would also be a congress that would empower it to make demands of pharmaceuticals and medical facilities for lower costs. This congress would never do that.

Based on experiences and on what a friend who was from England and lived part of the year here said, I don't want government near healthcare.

I agree, and I do not think these people are a small parody of humans anymore. Maybe in a generation or so the word socialism will not be so reviled, but the red scare effected even a good chunk of the old hippies. This idea the boomer generation was some sort of real liberal shift is simply not true. They may object to the openness of the most racist generation and their bitching, but they still cling to socialism bad ignorance.

I really would love to see the elderly floridians have to use the public health offices and find out how much easier and better it is when you can get everything done in one place, and you do not have to argue with insurance and private health providers to get proper care. For most of them it isn't about extreme health care. It is about maintenance and common troubles that you could really get on top of and make easy and cheap.

Curious about your firsthand experiences, because based on my experiences (including having been in a public hospital not two hours ago) the US system seems like a nightmare.

I think Boris and Brexit showed us there is a strain of UK idiot who believes that shit. I am not surprised that @RyanKCR is associated with UK CHUDs.

She passed away in 2019 at age 92. I think I'll pay attention to her life experiences and wisdom over you.

I almost had to pay several thousand dollars for the birth of my child, but luckily I had already paid several thousand dollars over the previous months in pregnancy-related appointments (including $1k+ over two ER visits) and so my deductible was met.

But nope, nothing wrong with that.

The visit to the hospital today was pregnancy related (a month to go) to meet with one of the two midwife's who will be there to deliver our child. It came with the first cost associated with any of the hospital visits up to now ($40 for me because I chose to get a bunch of vaccinations for myself up to date)

We did pay a few hundred dollars for scans and genetic testing early on, but that was because we chose to get optional early ones.

How does this work? She is dead so I should not say she was a CHUD?

Of course you take the opinions of CHUDS over other more intelligent people who know things. This is because you are a CHUD. I am pretty sure if she told you 2+2=tangerine you would believe that too. It is my point. Her age and year of death really have nothing to do with the fact she was stupid and wrong.

Oh, and I know a ton of elderly people who bitch about things that are good or good for them. It is a thing with a good percentage of them. You could be giving them money and they would bitch about it. It is the way many CHUDs are.

A couple of decades ago I had a friend who got knocked up by another friend. She decides to have the baby, and she has insurance. He is doing mini9mum wage work at best, and has no health insurance. They are not married. So the insurance company covered half the birth costs, and he got forced to pay the other half which was 11 grand. Even though the birth was really easy and he actually wanted to give what he could for the child, he was 11 grand in the rears because her health insurance would not cover the whole birth. Had he not been there for the birth and claimed to be the dad her insurance company would have covered the whole cost.

A second fact, the most natural procedure ever should not have a price tag of a new car. Today it is over 30 grand for the birth. This is not breaking cancer cures, or some newly developed special thing. This is the thing that every member of our species ever has had to do. It should be fucking free to give birth at this point. It should just be something we do because we need people.

Christ that's fucked.

the US has the highest expenditures per patient in the developed world



the US also has some of the worst healthcare outcomes of the developed world




and your life expectancy is downright embarrassing





But hey, the insurance companies are profiting greatly, so....

They already are in the form of licensing, schools, subsidies. They are very much there in the form of medicare and medicaid.

England has national health service where the provider is the government. They also have private hospitals. This is different from national health insurance. I'd be happy with either. Most countries are the latter. We're neither. I think our insurance lobby is too strong to make any progress. We're doomed to mediocrity. At least until you're 65.

Are you using medicaid?

No argument here. Just one of many ways that the current system is fucked, and we know how to do better, but rich people use morons to stop us from doing so.

When about 70-million (+/-) Yanks support a guy like Trump, I don't think there's much hope for the country.

Fine, public health care. How do we pay for it? More taxes? Cut something else? Deficit spending (we're really good at this one)?