Past-Due Medical Debt among Nonelderly Adults,

That would explain it. It must be working his end but not ours.

 

It is a matter of good for whom and bad for whom. A lot of these systems seem to be rationing care for everybody while in the US it just gets rationed for the poor and uninsured. If you are neither, then you may be better off. When I go to the ER, I can get just about every test they deem warranted right then and there and they get the results expeditiously. I don't have to wait weeks or months for an MRI. They will gladly zip me into the room and have it on my bill before I have a chance to go elsewhere to get that over-priced selfie. Hell, I don't even really need to have the MRI. The machine might just be available so they run me through it for funsies. Never know what one of them unnecessary tests might find. Once in a blue moon they actually do save a life by finding something unsuspected and asymptomatic.

 

This time the RT team learns how Russia's elderly struggle to survive in the far Urals villages, where they make up the majority of the population. With meager pensions and poor healthcare, the older generation is in desperate need of support, food and medical assistance. But in most cases, they have to rely on their own strength and determination.
https://www.rt.com/news/old-russia-elderly-people/

Changes to the Russian national health care system have proceeded according to an obscure logic and led to very mixed results for medical personnel — and sometimes to lethal results for patients.

The authorities wanted to optimize and modernize the system by boosting the quality of medical care and making it more accessible. Instead, medical care has become inaccessible for a large part of the population, especially in rural areas: doctors labor under increased workloads, thereby compromising patient care; mortality in hospitals has increased; general morbidity is on the rise; and doctors are inundated with paperwork.
https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-health-care-is-dying-a-slow-death-45839

I think RT and The Moscow Times are also Western propagandist.

 

This idea Americans have that health care is rationed in the rest of the industrialised world ( ie, those of us with universal, single payer health care systems) is just plain mistaken. It isn't rationed at all. You get the treatment you need. You get your choice of doctor/s, specialist, treatment and hospital, too. You can get second and third opinions.

Most importantly, you get your choice of primary care physician. You can go to any GP you like anywhere. Some bulk bill Medicare direct for everyone regardless of income and no one pays a cent, some only bulk bill Medicare for patients on low income earners on government health care cards. If your GP doesn’t bulk bill you, you pay a consultation fee and Medicare reimburses you all or most of it, usually within 24 hours. All GP consultations are subsidised by Medicare. And you've pre-paid for it all through your taxation. You occasionally get bills where there's a gap between a cost and what Medicare covers, but you don't hear about medical bankruptcies in countries with single payer, universal health care for the simple reason it does not and cannot happen.

You know, it's just hit me how many Americans I've spoken to talk about health care in terms of the ER. This may sound strange, but the ER is the last of an Australian's worries. It's the last worry of anyone in any industrialised country other than the US. For us, it's a given that you go to the ER, they will do whatever it takes to save your life and you will never be billed for it because you've already prepaid your treatment . They'll run whatever test is needed, if you need specialist treatment and your local hospital can't provide it, it will fly you to where the treatment is available and again you've prepaid for it all with your taxes.

Here, our concerns are with the gaps in specialist treatment of non-life threatening, chronic illnesses- that's where the gaps between what Medicare covers and the cost of treatment show up. We fight it as much as we can and the majority of us would like to pay more tax and close these gaps because they comprise so many people's quality of life. There are also things like dental treatment we'd like to see go single payer and would gladly pay more taxes for. A lot of dentists would like to see this happen too. They get tired of having to extract teeth that could have been saved if only the person could have afforded dentistry before. Another problem we have showing up is gaps between the cost and what Medicare covers for some drugs. This shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the profiteering and patent rights pharmaceutical corporations practise with newer drugs. Our government buys as much as it can to keep costs as low as it can, but when you have the sort of profiteering Epipen and Kaleo practice going on, governments can only do so much.

Universal, single payer health care is so much more efficient, it delivers much better health outcomes right across the board and it's so much cheaper. The OECD average cost of health care was 9% of GDP in 2014. Australia paid 8.9%. The USA paid 17.1% and has the worst infant mortality and life expectancy in the industrialised world.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...e-most-expensive-and-worst-performing/372828/

http://www.livescience.com/47980-us-infant-mortality-full-term-babies.html

http://pix11.com/2017/02/22/average...but-us-is-lowest-among-high-income-countries/

Even if it were true that single payer health care countries ration health care- which isn't true at all- it would appear rationing everyone might work a hell of a lot better than current US health care! There's a reason US politicians have been wringing their hands and opining something has to be done about US health care for 50 years.

Seriously Deckel, you guys have got to stop thinking your health care system is basically ok and fight for something better. We are, and our systems are a damn sight better than yours already.

 

Those divisions were caused by identity politics. You can probably thank Obama for that. I can't stand Trump, but it's fatuously stupid to suggest he has caused a division which has been fostered for at least a decade.

 

I'm more surprised that public health care still exists anywhere in Russia at all. As I wrote in an earlier post, the place was shattered, it's still gluing itself back together and the glue it's chosen is full blown, free market, libertarian capitalism. It privatised whatever it could and flogged it all off dirt cheap, then introduced public austerity to cover the loss of public income from the loss of income from all those public assets.

I feel desperately sorry for the Russian people. They were promised glasnost, freedom and prosperity and they've been given crony capitalism, lower standards of living and racketeering instead.

 

People who think there is no waiting for tests, treatments, or surgery in this country are delusional.

 

There is no rationing. Whatever you need, you get. Please note the operative word ... NEED (we won't help you with a facelift). And you get it at our best equipped hospitals, under the best staff money can buy. In a country with nationalised health, the best professionals naturally gravitate to the public hospitals - because they are the best funded. Private hospitals in a country with nationalised health are second (or worse) rate. You wouldn't use them in a life-threatening situation. Strictly for minor stuff and private rooms - if that's more important to you than the actual care you're receiving ... and for some people it actually is. Go figure.

 

Which country are you in Judy? We have waiting lists here for elective and non-urgent treatments, but you never wait for life saving treatment - excluding things like transplants of course, but medical science is working on growing replacement organs in labs and doing pretty well, too. Then there's all the mechanical things we've had for ages like pacemakers, artificial knees etc.

 

t

Why do you think you wait for life saving treatment in nations with national health care? It is always about elective, or non-urgent treatments. And the definition of which is which is up to the medical provider. That includes sonograms for pregnant women. The level of care received in this country, with the exception of emergency care is entirely dependent on how well insured you are.

 

Do you know one thing I think should be on Medicare and isn't, besides dentistry, of course? LASIK and PRK laser vision correction. Cuts down on a lot of already subsidised costs- regular, optometrist appointments, glasses- and it works beautifully. Especially when you consider Medicare covers some alternative medicine regimes that show no empirical results. I wonder if it's because laser surgery is newish or if it's because messing with conventional vision correction treatments would leave a lot of people unemployed?

 

Everyone I know on medicaid would strongly disagree with your assertion that health care is not rationed for them. They have to go to the other side of the state to get elective procedures because so few hospitals will take them as patients for scheduled procedures beyond the ER necessities.

 

Makes me wonder if the Kremlin is doing something to improve the situation?

 

Medicaid is an American thing. My understanding is it's some kind of health cover band aid for poor people in a country of privatised medicine where the person with the most money and the best HMO money can buy gets the best health care. Everybody else is rationed: the poor are rationed by Medicaid. The working class and lower middle class are rationed by how much money they can afford to spend on a HMO and what claims HMOs decide to cover and deny. I'm Australian. I was talking about Medicare. We have national, single payer, universal health care in Australia, just like all the rest of the developed world excluding the USA.

You can't form an opinion of a national, single payer, universal health care system based on America's Medicaid. America doesn't have a national, single payer, universal health care system. It has a multi payer, for-profit, private health care system. You're comparing apples and oranges. Our poor have a version of Medicaid, too. It's a Health Care Card. The only thing they get without having to pay additional taxes or fees for it that the rest of us don't is bulk billed GP visits, basic dental and vision aids. The rest of the care is exactly the same and all prepaid by taxes- whether you live in a mansion on Sydney Harbour or a cardboard box on Pitt Street. It's universal, it's not charity for the poor!

Seriously, telling an Australian or Brit or Canadian or Japanese or pretty well anyone in the industrialised world that our health care system couldn't possibly work because America's spot bandaid versions Medicaid and Obamacare aren't/weren't great is nuts. It's grasping at straws, trying to come up with something that looks a little like a universal health care system but is, in reality, nothing like it. It's like saying my umbrella won't keep the rain off me because your paper bag didn't keep the rain off you. Or sutures won't close the chest of an open heart surgery patient because steristrips didn't. Apples and oranges!

Here's a link to a good article I found in the Denver Post comparing the Canadian and US health care systems. it's written by a Canadian health care professional who has lived in the US for 27 years, so she has great working knowledge of both systems.

http://www.denverpost.com/2009/06/04/debunking-canadian-health-care-myths/

 

We don't wait for life savings treatments in nations with national, single payer, universal health care systems, Judy. I have stated this several times and so has Crank. So have other posters in PF lucky enough to live somewhere that has single payer, universal health care.

"And the definition of which is which is up to the medical provider". The medical provider in Australia and all the other nations with single payer universal health care is your GP, specialist or the staff in the ER - there is no HMO, no one to deny you treatment, no profit incentive to do so, no bureaucrat who has to give consent before the surgeon can whip you into theatre and perform open heart surgery.

You maybe stuck on a waiting list for non-life threatening surgery, it will be a pain in the rear and other places if you're waiting for something like an artificial knee joint, but you know at the end you'll be pain free, debt free, have a brand new high tech knee and still have your house. You won't die in pain because you couldn't afford the surgery or the HMO denied it because it was a pre-existing condition, and most of your countrymen are speaking out about waiting lists loudly and publicly.

I still don't know what country you're from Judy, because you didn't answer when I asked, but I can assure you sonograms- or ultrasounds as we call them here- are a routine part of antenatal care in Australia and they are subsidised by Medicare. There's no problem accessing them. I live in a small country town a few days drive from a capital city and I have several ultrasound providers to choose from.If you are a low income earner on a Health Care Card they are free. I imagine cost would also depend on the antenatal clinic you choose. If you are going to the public hospital antenatal clinic it would be free or bulk billed and most women would probably choose this option since they'll probably be giving birth there too.

http://www.pregnancybirthbaby.org.au/routine-antenatal-tests

http://www.pregnancybirthbaby.org.au/ultrasound-scan

Ultrasounds are common here for all kinds of things. My last one was on my shoulder after an injury and it didn’t cost me a cent- I'd prepaid for it with my taxes.

 

Mmm. What's Congress doing to improve America's? Health care was a huge issue at the Australian federal election last year. The people won the battle, but we're still fighting the war.

 

They abolish Obamacare.
but they promise to replace it with a working affordable one, I hope they could manage to do that.

and is this true?

On paper, Russian citizens are entitled to free universal healthcare. In practice, however, they are required to take out compulsory private medical insurance, while it’s also common for patients at state hospitals to bribe doctors for adequate treatment. Although hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the country’s two biggest cities, are largely serviceable, the situation is different in cash-strapped regions such as the province of Penza. Donald Trump, the US President-elect, and right-wing politicians in Europe may be feting Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader. But the grim reality of Russian provincial state healthcare often has more in common with Third World countries than a supposed resurgent superpower: 17, 500 towns and villages across Russia have no medical infrastructure at all. “Russia's state hospitals and clinics are in a tragic condition, especially in the provinces,” says Gennady Gudkov, an opposition politician and retired KGB colonel.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/the-horror-of-russian-healthcare-a7443121.html

 

And Thus

ObamaCare was a scam to make sure the Medical Profiteers
are not left holding the bag.



The cost of ObamaCare for a healthy, young family who get the cold/flu
at the same time is obscene. $20 co pay for $0.50 worth of Amoxicillin.
Plus the doctor visit co-pay, plus the monthly premium, etc.

ObamaCare is a scam to insure the archaic Health Insurance companies as viable
as a coal stoker on a modern train kept for "union" reasons.
And who pays the bill? Working people who budget their lives.


Moi, M.D. ret.

r > g

Can You Believe the Chutzpah?
Across an immense, unguarded, ethereal border, Canadians, cool and unsympathetic,
regard our America with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.​

 

Incidentally Americans, the reason people like me from single payer, universal health care system nations keep telling you the difference between our system and yours isn't because we think our systems are perfect, they're not, and we have to fight just to hang on to what we've got, let alone improve it. It isn't because we're boasting either. It's because we're getting a better deal than you are and we want you to get a better deal, too. Honestly. The day we hear America has universal single payer health care, too, we'll crack open a bottle of champagne and cheer. We want you to have things at least as good as the things we have.

 

Mmm. I heard a bit of coverage where a female GOP representative was explaining why they got rid of ACA and that they were considering all kinds of alternative health care systems. I think she was a senator. The room was full of GOP members, one shouted "You've had seven years!!" and then they all started chanting it.

I was actually surprised the GOP took all that lovely free money away from the insurance corporations. Perhaps they didn't. Maybe they just took the care away and the insurers kept the money for breach of contract or something.

And I wouldn't have a clue if the stuff about Russia is true, but as I've already stated a few times since Russia was smashed to pieces only a few decades ago I'm surprised it's managing to provide any public health services at all.

I must say I don't get what seems to be American glee and a need to gloat at the sufferings of Russians. I could understand Americans comparing themselves to another very rich, stable, prosperous, first world democracy that has never been invaded but that ain't Russia. Why what seems to be a need to feel better than Russia? It's like crowing your Rottweiler beat up a beagle.

 

But, What will happen to the Health Insurance industry

 

Good question. The public purse props it up big time already - that's why 17% of US GDP goes on health care compared to the OECD average of 9%. How do you think they could sunset the HMOs? Could they maybe keep them, but regulate them- price capping, universal insurance and no care denials all by law ? MMT macroeconomics would point out the US can't run out of its own fiat currency because it creates money by the act of spending it too. And you're all spending so much of your revenue on it already it can't be unaffordable. Finding US politicians with the will to take obscene profit away from pain. Mmm. How indeed?

I'll look into proposals about how to do it if you do. They have to be out there. The US has been trying to walk its abortion of a health care system back for about 50 years. Thanks for asking the question, Moi. You've given me something to look up and learn about. You certainly wouldn’t need half the bloated bureaucracy or 9/10s of the claims assessors anymore, would you? Some HMO workers would be able to transfer across to the new system. Quite a lot, probably. But not all.

 

It is not grasping at straws. It is the quality of care you are used to. You are used to something different than many Americans are used to. Medicaid does not work because doctors don't take it for the most part because they lose money treating those patients. Medicare is only slightly better. Australia has 23 million people. The United States has 360 million people. you have 1300 hospitals; the US has over 5500 hospitals. You pretending that what works in Australia can work in the US is apples to oranges. Just distributing 340 million more bandaids among 4 times as many hospitals would cost exponentially more in the US than in Australia.

 

With respect Deckel, what do you know about Australian Medicare that you put it on the same level as American Medicaid? As I've already said, apples and oranges.

Doesn't the fact that America has the highest health costs and close to the worst health outcomes right across the board in the industrialised world not tip you off to the fact that the system you're used to is farked?

Ok. Yes. Australia has a much smaller population than the US, Australia also has a widely scattered population, but we're talking GDP. You know, proportional costs against income. China and India are both much poorer with much bigger populations than the US, but they've both managed single payer, universal health care. Mexico managed it, so did Canada, Cuba and all of Scandinavia. 397.5 million people in Western Europe have managed it. It blows out to over 500 million if you include the rest of the EU. Everyone seems to have managed it but the US: why is that? Why are Americans content with something that costs more than anyone else pays and delivers so much less than anyone else gets? I know we'll all get used to a rut even if it's full of pig manure, but that's ridiculous. Why don't you guys fight for a better deal for yourselves? We do. Some idiot politician even looks sidewise at Medicare and it costs them elections. Sometimes they don't even make it to the next election. The Brits do the same. So do Canadians. So do Europeans. Everyone fights for decent, affordable health care for all citizens except Americans. Why is that?!

And please don't tell me it's because you're all used to it. Plenty of Americans were used to slavery but hey! Civil war! Plenty were used to segregation but hey! Selma! You guys have fought and won magnificent battles for each other before. Why not this one?

 

[QUOTE = "Thehumankind, должность: 1067187792, член: 62823"] На этот раз команда RT узнает, как пожилые люди борьба России, чтобы выжить в далеких уральских деревнях, где они составляют большинство населения. С мизерные пенсии и плохое здравоохранение, старшее поколение отчаянно нуждается в поддержке, пищевой и медицинской помощи. Но в большинстве случаев, они должны полагаться на свои собственные силы и решимости.
https://www.rt.com/news/old-russia-elderly-people/

Изменения в российской национальной системе здравоохранения продолжились в соответствии с неясной логикой и привела к очень смешанные результаты для медицинского персонала - а иногда и к летальным результатам для пациентов.

Власти хотели оптимизировать и модернизировать систему за счет повышения качества медицинской помощи и делает его более доступным. Вместо того, чтобы медицинская помощь стала недоступной для значительной части населения, особенно в сельской местности: врачи труда при повышенных нагрузках, тем самым ставя под угрозу ухода за пациентами; смертность в больницах увеличилось; общая заболеваемость находится на подъеме; и врачи завалены бумагами.
https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-health-care-is-dying-a-slow-death-45839

Я думаю, RT и The Moscow Times также Западная пропагандистом. [/ QUOTE]

И что? Я писал вам выше - в России есть проблемы в медицине, а также в любой стране мира. Но в России - лекарство бесплатно. И это факт.

Но я рад, что вы читаете RT.

Кстати, The Moscow Times - это рог олигархов. И да. The Moscow Times является западная пропаганда. Владелец издания является жена медиамагната.
Но это не имеет значения, потому что Россия является самой свободной страной в мире.
В России власти не поднимать вопрос об ограничениях на западных СМИ, как они это делают в ЕС и США в отношении, например, RT.
В России, свобода слова, в США и ЕС - диктатура, которая напоминает фашизм.