Free healthcare in UK?

I agree with a lot of this at least what I perceive as your premise. We can do better. We need to do better. It will be a combination of free market and government that is the solution.

Unfortunately I do not see it happening. Medicare was the beginning of where costs began to get out of control. It laid the groundwork for the fascism (Big Insurance/Big Pharma/Big Hospital/Provider) to begin and take over. Then you add the advancements in technology. I am not sure we can undo what has been done. Well we can. But politically I do not see it happening.

There needs to be a shift back to a more free market system though. We need to embolden the doctor/patient relationship getting physicians back to being their own boss and not the employee of a large system.

I have not changed my thoughts on the solution in some time.

$2K HSA for every single American every year (you can do this with the current Medicare funding and still have hundreds of billions left over for chronic illnesses and those in more need than others/and you pass it on to family or friends if there is any left in the account when you die).

True catastrophic insurance (Not paying a negotiated $137 so I can have my kid get tested for strep that he almost certainly has but we need to confirm before getting the antibiotic script for $2/my recent personal anecdote).

Big Pharma is tough. But have to come up with a way to reward and incentivize based on outcomes.

These are general ideas and it would not be easy. As a bridge would have to be made for all those who are older. Increased tax for so many years or something along those lines. As it would take a few decades to fully implement.

 

Look up where our healthcare dollars go. Tons of staff in every doctors’ office to manage different insurance, stock dividends, important Insurance executives, etc. We seem to have the worse parts of different systems.

One of the key parts of Obama Care that gets left out is continuity of coverage. Before, many stayed in a job with company care, because if they left, they could be denied.

A system designed by politicians and lobbyists

 

Which means they are now paying 4 times the increase. Hence they likely made the employees pay a higher percentage. Offered worse coverage. All to try and be able to still offer insurance…

 

Interestingly when Brits or Canadians for that matter complain about their healthcare systems the citizens of both countries never call for the replacement of their systems (in the UK the NHS is the provider for the most Brits; in Canada it's a single payer system with the overwhelming majority of healthcare provided by physicians in private practice) with an American style system in which healthcare is essentially controlled by private for profit insurance companies and private for profit (even though a number are technically "not for profit" they still operate as for profit entities) hospital chains. In fact, when NAFTA was being debated in 1993 and 1994, the biggest issue in Canada wasn't a fear of cheap imported goods from Mexico as it was in the US but rather the fear that Canada would have to ditch it's single payer healthcare system so that private US health insurance companies could compete in Canada.

 

I'm not sure this UK issue serves as a condemnation of a nationalized healthcare system as shown by other countries without this particular problem. They have an issue that needs to be addressed, as happens with any complex bureaucratic system. We have our own problems with 27 million people uninsured (and many more under-insured) with a per capita expenditure almost 3x the UK's.

 

Americans are content with our healthcare system. If they really cared they'd vote for change

 

It's somewhat ironic that a certain segment of the American electorate the would benefit the most from increased access to healthcare tend to vote against their own self-interest. As an example Virginia refused to expand eligibility for Medicaid as provided under the ACA until 2018 when the both the state legislature and the governorship came under Democratic control as the result of the 2017 election. The Virginians who would benefit most from expanded Medicaid eligibility, residents of poor rural counties especially those in the Southwest part of the state were among the strongest supporters of Republicans who opposed Medicaid expansion.

 

We have private insurance that costs more per person, plus plenty of crowd funding on top. About 1/3 of gofundme are for medical concerns. Some are for elective procedures, I'm sure. But many are not.

The $2k a year HSA sounds great, but then it also means paying out of pocket for everything. Get prescribed Ozempic, which is around $300/month out of pocket, and bye-bye HSA funds. And that doesn't account for paying for the doctor's visit in full.

The free market works great for almost everything. But with healthcare, the commodity is a person's health. And when that goes south, it can get real expensive, real quick to fix. Don't repair it, and the consequences are dire.

There should be no profit in healthcare. There is also no perfect solution. If one existed, we would know by now. But statistically, countries with single payer and government care have better overall outcomes and pay less.

 

Then it should be easy for republicans to fix… I mean, if they had control of Congress/White House for a couple of years, they should be able come up something Better than the “stupidest solution”… right?

 

Their plan is coming...in two weeks!

 

No they are not. Not in any way. This is one of the reasons the Obama administration were idiots. Health Insurance is a parasite on health care. Nothing more.

 

Maybe they want the American system, where for just $20,000 a year your family can get a card that says you have health insurance, and that entitles you to visit doctors you didn’t pick, and pay even more on top of that, assuming the insurance company allows the visit.

 

The fact that you look at everything through us/them glasses is pretty pathetic. This is not a republican/democrat issue. It is about creating a real solution by addressing the multiple problems plaguing our Health system. Putting a bunch of MIT nitwits with no real world experience in a room to solve a problem they don’t even pretend to understand leads to Obamacare; A system which did literally nothing to solve the problem they were tasked with.

 

In '19 I became very ill. I lost almost 50 lbs and I was at most 15 lbs over weight. No one could figure out what was wwrong.I simply could not keep any food down.
Turns out I have EPI. The drug, actually enzymes, to treat this is very expensive. After months of sickness including a stay in the hospital a doctor finally ordered the correct test to find the problem. My doctor told me that the only reason he thought to give the test was the sales rep kept hassling him to test more people. The greedy bastards just wanted to make a high profit sale and inadvertently, probably, saved my life.

 

This is such a ridiculous claim that gets thrown around. While absolutely some big medicine abuses the idea of “profit”…

I say there should be no “profit” in whatever service or product you are involved in providing. There should be no profit in home building as we all need shelter (on a side note we should all get the exact same houses).

And yes. You bring up the one area that I don’t have a great answer for. Expensive scripts. But that extra hundreds of billions could be part of that answer. At the end of the day people paying for the service is how to control the market. Right now the big corporations control the market and not the doctor and patient. That is what needs to be fixed. There is no reason it should have cost $137 to get my son tested for strep a few months ago. It was the first visit to the doctor in years for something other than wellness or a physical in our family. Most sicknesses take care of themselves (including Covid ). But when you have the intel to guide you to an easy diagnosis and a simple test is all that is needed. We do not need UF Health and Shands (who bought out the pediatric practice we were at/oldest has moved to our primary care but younger two had not had their initial yet) and Florida Blue negotiating $137 to run a simple strep test. That said…it probably would have been cheaper to find a Walgreens or someplace with a clinic that could run the simple test.

 

It is an us/them issue. Republicans have ZERO interest in fixing anything. They are more beholden to insurance companies, and can’t sell the idea of “even poor people need healthcare” to their base because they don’t care about anyone but themselves.

 

Dude, of all the posts that I’ve read of yours on this thread, this is the most telling, and it is this very baneful attitude which has permeated this country and, in particular, Washington DC which is why nothing gets done. If you truly believe Republicans have zero interest in fixing anything, then you should probably just stop posting, because you lack any rational basis of thought. I would make the same comment to anyone making similar generalities against Democrats. It’s just not true for the majority of either party. It is your attitude, and people like you, that prevent the Democrats and Republicans from working together to solve problems. 10% of both parties need to STFU. Republicans, in general, don’t have a problem with trying to provide healthcare to less fortunate people, they just don’t agree with the solution the Democrats have been trying to push down their throat. Obamacare has nothing to do with providing healthcare, it is just a giant shift of wealth to give the democratic voting base free stuff which is actually worthless. Not a single low income/person living in poverty is better off because of Obamacare.

 

The reason why I know that Republicans have zero interest in fixing anything is because for 8 years they campaigned on "ObamaCare is the worst thing to happen to America, Vote for us, we have better ideas, we'll make Health Care Great Again!".

Then ... when given the chance to "make the worst thing to happen to America" even slightly better ... they have absolutely nothing. No ideas. "Who knew Health Care was so complicated". Total Joke. They were one thumbs down from McCain away from just repelling and sending us back to square one.

And your last sentence is just laughably wrong... it's people like you who are the problem. The "I got mine, everyone else die can quick if they get sick" crowd.

 

For most people, literally every healthcare decision they make is tied to their health insurance coverage. What treatments are covered? How much out of pocket will this cost? What doctor can I see? Do I need a referral? What prescription costs are covered?

People decide not to go see a doctor because they don't want to pay for it. People will divorce their spouse at end of life rather than leave them with medical debt. It's all tied together.

 

That is just false. I'll use my own experience as an example. Immediately prior to ACA passing, I started dating the woman who would become my wife. We were both in our early/mid 20s at the time and in graduate school. Despite having recently been a competitive world class athlete (she was a swimmer that swam with one of the top swim clubs in the entire country), she had a heart attack at 23. We later found out this was due to a complication from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (although this would take a decade to figure out). However, due to the heart issue (and a variety of other symptoms of EDS that were each diagnosed as separate disorders), when we decided to get married, we were faced with a choice due to the fact that she wasn't really insurable at that time due to a pre-existing conditions:

I could leave school before we got married, take a job I didn't really want, then get married and stay in that job as long as I could stay there, and we would be protected from either having to forego care she needed or risk bankruptcy (the surgery to repair the symptom of the overall condition was in the low 6 figures and could only be performed by a very select group of doctors).

I could choose not to marry somebody I loved so that I could stay in school.

Or, finally, we could get married and risk bankruptcy due to her health constantly.

Thankfully, before we had to make this choice, ACA passed, I stayed in school (where I had insurance that would bridge us until implementation), and eventually I got a high paying job that had insurance that allowed her onto the plan, and now we have an actual diagnosis for what is wrong and a treatment plan to help her manage it (which has reduced the costs to the insurance).

We would have none of that without ACA. Instead, we would likely have been more of the millions living day-to-day with the stress of eventual bankruptcy due to health problems outside of their control hanging over us.

If you come up with a better solution to the pre-existing condition problem than ACA, let me know.