Obamacare Life Spiral

[John Galt]

well, i think they are all about equal, but the US does have societal issues that impact life expectancy that are separate from health care efficiency, namely, kids killing kids, which causes the US to dip down slightly against the rest when those are factored in. i agree suicide is a mental health issue and frankly the us handling of mental health is abysmal but i don't know if other countries are much better since it's a difficult issue both to diagnose (often requires the patient to have the will to get help) and to treat (since human brains are the most complex thing in the known universe)

[exploited]

The issue with mental care is that we threw the baby out with the bathwater. Once we found out how abusive and f**k up our asylums were, instead of fixing them, we simply shut them down. This was a terrible mistake that ended up costing us far more economically and socially than the money we saved.

Personally, I like tiered healthcare, if it is done right. My idea: universal healthcare for all services that cost over a certain dollar amount. Private insurance for the everyday bullshit like checkups and routine doctors visits. Either that or start charging a minimal fee for doctors visits, like $5-10.

In this way, you discourage wasteful and stupid doctors visits, while also insuring that all citizens have the ability to receive care. By setting it to a dollar amount, you make it so that insurance is going to be dirt cheap, otherwise people will just pay out of pocket. You also encourage specialization... So you'd have clinics that only do routine checkups, or certain services, operating privately, thus driving down costs. But you also have a large single provider for all the big stuff, which also drives down costs.

[Professor]

[Professor]

[Professor]

You know what the funny part is? Everyone seems to ignore the example that we had here in the US of "universal healthcare". Here in Louisiana, and we were the last state to get rid of it, we had "universal healthcare" for decades. There were large hospitals in every big city, that were called "charity hospitals". You could go to them regardless of your ability to pay. And, not just for emergency care. If you needed an eye exam, you'd go there. If you needed a CT scan, you went there. They might ask you if you had health insurance, and if you did, then they'd want to get paid. But, those with insurance were treated the same as those without.

It was the solution that a lot of people call for.

And, it was a miserable failure. Wait times for many procedures were months long. It was exorbitantly expensive, yet no matter how much money the legislature threw at it, it was always underfunded. The waiting rooms were filled to capacity and the facilities were crumbling. On the other hand, because they got the worst of the worst, if you got a GSW or similar, you wanted to go to Charity, because they saw it every single day.

Here are the facilities I am talking about. These were in existence up until around 2011.

https://mellenpress.com/uploads/Roberts ... ver%20.jpg

[Spider]

[Professor]

[Indy]

Well, don't forget how much influence the food corporations have over things like laws and controlling the message.

Or, for example, when Michelle Obama makes fitness/fighting childhood obesity her cause, she is mocked and dismissed by those who oppose her husband politically. So one potentially huge voice that could be heard gets snuffed.

Keep gov't (meaning: Obama) out of our dippin' cheese breadsticks! Socialism!

Or something like that.

[jimmyz]

[Spider]