Mend Your Diet

Health care suggestion or comment please?

I live in Europe and I pay the equivalent of about $200 a month for private health insurance. I can use the public health care for free if I want to as well of course. What I found interesting is that I can use my private health care all around the world except for Canada and the USA. I would need to pay $900 a month instead. I was really shocked. The reason is because in Canada, the health care is very expensive since it is 100% socialized (no private). And...in America, it is high on account of the medical insurance costs for the doctors which they need to pay on account of multi-million dollar lawsuits. The great thing about private health care along with free health care, is that it keeps the costs down...and we also don't allow these types of lawsuits which is the other reason why our costs are lower. I was wondering what any of you would think of adopting a system like this? It's so logical, keeps costs down, and absolultely everyone has access to free health care.

Public Comments

1. Trial lawyers are so entrenched in politics, it would be impossible to pass a law that limits professional liability law suits. This is in the US. Most of those in the Congress are attorneys. The lawyers also have lobbyists looking out for their interest.
2. cause the ruling elite, the ones that profit from our outrageous healthcare cost have been putting the idea in peoples heads that any change in the system would be a change toward communism, socialism~!!! and in the USA those are fightin words~!!! as long as people have this idea in their heads there is no chance of a change~!!!
3. If you believe that nonsense about health care costs being so high because of lawsuits, you are a fool. The reason health care costs so much is the because lobbyists working for the insurance, pharmaceutical and medical industries bribe the politicians to vote in a way that profits their companies. That's what a Lobbyist does. Another thing to think about is why your health care coverage doesn't extend to the U.S. and Canada. It probably isn't that your insurance isn't accepted here, it's that your insurance won't PAY for medical treatment here. One more thought, If the Doctors and Hospitals practiced good medicine, There'd BE no lawsuits!
4. I think that you should check into canadian helth care before you site them as being good. From everything that I have read their sustem leaves people without appointments for months at a time and then has very limited things that are covered. This includes most canser and heart attack coverage and people are often dead before they can get an appointment. You are correct about the cost of American insurance being driven up due too lawsuits however I just had major surgury for what was believed too be Liver Canser and paid absolutely nothing for the surgury and several days stay in the hospital through my insurance through the Kasier Hospital Foundation. By the way it turned out that it was not Canser as suspected but a tangle of veins and arteries that was showing up as a growth. If you have the right coverage in the U.S. the insurance is great.
5. No country has "free" health care. You're just blessed you've not been hit with a serious illness or you'd see the multiple failings of UHC. It's rationed care, it is a bankrupt system, and it results in fewer providers as well. You've also been misinformed about lawsuits and malpractice as the causes of high health costs in the US. It's government meddling and insurers that don't follow antitrust or contract law that drive the prices up here. THAT is what needs to be fixed. When we have little pockets of free market, care is affordable, accessible, and high quality--the opposite of governmentally run systems. Canada also has a thriving illegal private sector because of government care being an issue. So no, absolutely NO interest whatsoever in going to UHC as it's not working. Here's a Canadian doc, now in the US as 500 of his colleagues come per year: "...Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.” And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room. This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente. Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer." http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html
6. People in the US have been lied to. They are not told the truth about the mess they have for health care. In the US, people pay more for healthcare, and it is worse. Life expectancy is lower than in Western Europe, and also, infant mortality is higher. The facts are (as someone who works in the UK's NHS) we in the UK pay less, live longer, and babies who die in the USA would have had a better chance of life if they were born in the UK. Should Americans be proud?