US government health care

[autumn_sylver]

I've been hearing a lot on the news in the last couple of days about the health care reform in the US, and how a lot of people don't want it and are protesting it. I really don't understand why. Government health care means that everybody has insurance that you can't be dropped from if you get sick. It means that when you have to go to the hospital

Comments

[autumn_sylver]

One thing I've noticed is that most of the people who are protesting it are white middle-class people who can most likely afford whatever they need to pay to have private health insurance. What they don't seem to realize is that not everyone can afford it. Some people don't even make enough to pay for both food and rent. How the hell are those people supposed to be able to afford health insurance?
People in the US lose their houses because of huge medical bills. That's not right.

About 8 years ago, my grandfather, who was in his 80's, had a stroke. They most certainly did not try to tell him that he should end his life, like Americans seem to think is going to happen. They did everything they could to make him healthy again. He lost some function on one side of his body and needed physiotherapy. The government paid for that too. Unfortunately, a few years after that, he had a few more, bigger strokes, and there was nothing they could do for him. He was clinically brain dead.

Here in Canada, a lot of people misuse the emergency room. They treat it like a walk-in clinic and go there for minor things that could easily be treated in a doctor's office. Because of that, there are really long wait times. (But it's the same in the US). A few years ago when my mother had to be taken to the hospital, we ended up waiting there all night, for about 9 hours. We went in just before midnight, and she wasn't seen by a doctor until just before 9 am the next morning. (By the time we got to the hospital, they had stabilized her heart, and it wasn't an emergency situation anymore). When she finally was seen by a doctor, he spent about 10 minutes with her and then sent her home.
If people would just go to the doctor if it's not an emergency, it wouldn't be like that.

"Why can't the US get it into their thick skulls that it's NOT replacing private healthcare? There's nothing stopping people who can afford private healthcare to continue doing so."

I was debating it on LJ with some Americans once, and someone actually said to me "at least in the US, we're allowed to buy health insurance." They somehow think that here in Canada, we're not allowed to buy health insurance. We'd all be in pretty bad shape if that was true. There are a lot of things that government health care doesn't cover, like glasses, braces and prescription medications.