On government-funded healthcare
It's distressing to read that the_ferrett had to take a guess at whether he was having a heart attack, because he couldn't afford to blow $5,000 on a false alarm. Like most Australians, I pay 1.5% of my income towards universal health insurance. (Low income people don't pay, but are still insured. High income people can either pay an extra percentage, or get private hospital cover.)
I don't understand how the topic is worthy of debate in the USA. How can government funding be so abhorrent that so many people are put at risk? In Australia, the only attempt to weaken Medicare since it was introduced in the 1970s was the disastrous conservative campaign of 1992 - since then, it's understood that Australians will not tolerate any attempt to take our excellent healthcare system away.
Of course, 'socialized medicine' means that there is no freedom of choice, right? Well, no, actually.
In a potentially amusing conincidence, I've just had microsurgery, and I've chosen to spend $5,000 of my own money getting it done by the person that my research indicates is the best in the country. Because if you're going to slice open my scrotum, I'm hiring the best damned scrotum-slicer I can find.
But when I was in a very bad place 10 years ago, the government contributed a couple of thousand to my psychiatrist bills, and I didn't pay a damned cent for the times I went to hospital (not the time that I didn't have a stroke, not the time that I didn't have a heart attack, and not the time that I didn't break my neck). The thought that I would have had to weigh up my finances and say to the doctor "Actually, I can't afford an X-Ray" or "Actually, I can't afford a CAT scan of my spine" - that terrifies me.
I don't understand how the topic is worthy of debate in the USA. How can government funding be so abhorrent that so many people are put at risk? In Australia, the only attempt to weaken Medicare since it was introduced in the 1970s was the disastrous conservative campaign of 1992 - since then, it's understood that Australians will not tolerate any attempt to take our excellent healthcare system away.
Of course, 'socialized medicine' means that there is no freedom of choice, right? Well, no, actually.
In a potentially amusing conincidence, I've just had microsurgery, and I've chosen to spend $5,000 of my own money getting it done by the person that my research indicates is the best in the country. Because if you're going to slice open my scrotum, I'm hiring the best damned scrotum-slicer I can find.
But when I was in a very bad place 10 years ago, the government contributed a couple of thousand to my psychiatrist bills, and I didn't pay a damned cent for the times I went to hospital (not the time that I didn't have a stroke, not the time that I didn't have a heart attack, and not the time that I didn't break my neck). The thought that I would have had to weigh up my finances and say to the doctor "Actually, I can't afford an X-Ray" or "Actually, I can't afford a CAT scan of my spine" - that terrifies me.