Healthcare Systems Failing in the USA

[pdlloyd]

My husband is sitting in the next room, watching Meet the Press, while I sit at my computer and listen in, occasionally commenting on situations I find particularly vexing. There's a lot going on in the world today that's of concern (I'm understating. Bigtime!) and I'm not always happy with the ways in which politicians attempt to defend our

Comments

[heleninwales]

Oh, dear. We moan here in the UK about the postcode lottery that makes some drugs available to some patients and not to others, but this usually relates to new and relatively untried treatments, not to their main medical care.

[pdlloyd]

I've never heard of the postcard lottery. When you say this is for new and untried treatments, do mean that they are experimental, or that they've passed the experimental stage, but are not yet widely available?

[heleninwales]

postcard lottery

Possibly that was a typo, but I meant postcode, (like the US zipcode) lottery. That is, the treatment a patient receives can be determined by where they live.

In the UK we have this thing called NICE who basically say what the NHS will pay for and what's too expensive/not proven to be effective enough

[pdlloyd]

Yes, I think that discrepancies like the one you mention are one of the things that people over here point to, when advocates for universal (or near-universal) health care is discussed. Yet, when they do this, they ignore the many people here who get little to no medical care, because they can't afford it.

Is the treatment new? It does seem to me, however, to be the sort of preventative treatment that will save more money than it costs, which I think should be a strong factor for making it universally available.

Do you feel that by living in Wales you are less likely to be eligible for treatments?

[asakiyume]

It will be like in China, where if you can't afford care, you just resign yourself to die. I heard a mother of one of the children who been fed exclusively formula that was adulterated with melamine: he had kidney stones, and now has leukemia. (That may not be caused by the melamine; they don't know.) The family can't afford the cost of a bone marrow transplant, so the boy will just die.

:-(

[pdlloyd]

The melamine situation is just terrible. It's so indescribably sad and distressing to think that it is possible anywhere in the world for us to allow infant formula or any other product to be consumed by humans or animals to be contaminated by toxic substances.

[marycatelli]

Or Canada, where one out of three doctors has sent patients to the US to get treatment they can't get in Cananda

[pdlloyd]

I've heard so many things, both good and bad about the US health care system in comparison to the systems in Canada and other countries. It seems likely that there are things the Canadian system handles better than that in the US, and things the US system handles better. I also know that there's great variation from state to state with regard to the health care system. I've actually seen it for myself and my family, as I've interacted with health practitioners here in Arizona and compared them to the care my family in Texas receive and the care I received, when I still lived there.