Random is the word I would use to describe

[krisomniac]

So

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Of course, if your dog gets sick, you can keep working to raise money for ongoing treatment. If you get sick (or disabled), then what? And you can choose whether or not to get a pet (or dump it, as the many shelters can attest) but you can't choose that for your own body.

One good thing about living in a country with universal healthcare is that public health initiatives can be genuinely said to be saving everyone money. There are structural barriers to maintaining health rather than treating sickness, as there are in any health system, but we're working on them by increasing access to allied professionals such as podiatrists, nutritionists and physiotherapists, and widening the services provided by more traditional providers like pharmacists.

[krisomniac]

Well, he explains in the article that you would be covered under a national plan for catastrophic stuff (like the sort of things that would keep you from working). I think one of the issues with his suggestions is how you would define the kind of 'safety net' healthcare that the government would cover versus the more routine healthcare you'd pay out of pocket. PLUS, as Lacy pointed out, getting people to pay out of pocket for routine care rather than wait for emergencies is something that doesn't happen on its own (just look at it today). Although, that said, I think if the cost of routine healthcare was driven down enough by sich a plan, people would be more likely to pay for it. Who knows.

Yeah, there is no perfect system out there to model ours after, but I do agree that ours is a lot more effed than most. I'm up for change-- even if it means screwing up a different way-- just to get out of the rut we're in.

[lacylu42]

I don't necessarily wholly disagree with the free market concept for health care, but as the best friend of a vet tech who worked for a Banfield (corporate vet chain in Pet Smart) I know lots of stories where people chose to euthanize, not because the pet's condition was incurable or even that expensive, but because they did not have the money to cover whatever treatment was recommended or necessary. They simply did not want to (or perhaps in some cases couldn't) pay out of pocket for care.

All I'm saying is, I don't think it would work for everyone. You and me, maybe, because we are generally upwardly mobile and smart enough to save, but as this economic crisis has shown us, most people are NOT smart enough to save. I think people would go without routine care if they were forced to pay for it out of pocket and just get sicker until their insurance or someone else had to pay for their catastrophic illness.

And wow! That's a really jaded opinion of the American public, isn't it? :D

[krisomniac]

So, he addresses that in the article with mandatory health savings accounts and addresses the fact of people not being able to pay into them by showing (and this blew me away) that 1.7-2 million dollars of potential income over a person's career are paid to health insurance premiums rather than to them. In essance, we ARE footing the huge bill for medical care-- only we don't see ourselves paying it. If we put that money into an account that we could use at our own discretion and that (and here's the interesting part i'm not sure I agree with) we could withdraw from for other expenses provided we keep it over a minimum of, say $50k/person then we really do act as consumers. This isn't to say it would be equitable. People whose companies do not pay for insurance now don't have that extra incom etc. But it is an intersting way to look at things (he gets into the HSA's around page 4