Health Care Isn't Only About Emergencies

[zingerella]

I recognize that health emergencies, surgery, and life-saving procedures are very sexy, engaging, and generally fascinating. Tales of citizens of the U.S. who cannot afford chemotherapy or surgery, or who get turned back from emergency rooms rightly set people's blood to boiling.

I wish, though, that discussions of health care, and in particular,

Comments

[chickenfeet2003]

Which is why, as an ehealth dude, I've spent a good chunk of the last two years looking at diabetes, because early detection and proper treatment of diabetes (which is what an effective system of primary care would do among other things) prevents ER visits, blindness, heart failure, amputations and other things which are both very bad for the individual concerned and very expensive to the system. I'm convinced that one of the reasons the US system is so expensive and so ineffective is that stuff isn't detected and dealt with soon enough.

On a more personal note, imagine the lemur's situation in the US. She could never have had the genetic screening because then she would have had to declare a pre-existing condition which would likely have meant she wouldn't be covered if she did get cancer. If she had the screening there is no way a US insurer would pay for the preventive stuff that might keep her cancer free.

[zingerella]

I'm convinced that one of the reasons the US system is so expensive and so ineffective is that stuff isn't detected and dealt with soon enough.

Oh, me too. I knew someone who died of untreated diabetes. She was hospitalized once she stopped being able to walk.

It was such a stupid death.

The Lemur's hypothetical situation makes my head ache. What a messed up way to do things-it's guaranteed to result in more sick people.

[dglenn]

I know someone who worked for an HMO (answering phones for customer support) who died of what would've been a perfectly ordinary cold/flu if she could've gotten enough time off to get fully better, or could've seen a doctor, before it spread to her heart.

For such a wealthy nation, the US has far too many of these stupid deaths. Being poor, I actually expect to become such a statistic myself at some point -- but I try not to think about it too much, because despair's no fun.

[zingerella]

Gah! That's just tragic, and wasteful, and so very, very incongruous with living in the wealthiest, most powerful society in the history of the world. It's like there's a class of people who can afford to live by the standards of the early 21st century and another class who have one foot held stuck in the early 20th.

I think the U.S. government ought to be hanging its collective, corporate head in shame at the ill it's allowed the insurance industry to do to citizens of the U.S., I really do.

[krinndnz]

Hell yes to this. This piece exposes a thing that's important to me: universal health care is not just better in the slightly-more-optimum way, better in the way that one would expect a government to argue over for a while and split hairs about, it's compellingly better than the current US system. I hold a grudge against all the elements of power in the US that are actively working against a change to universal coverage: they are responsible for deaths, illness, and monetary losses, they are performing evil works.

[zingerella]

The part that keeps boggling me is that, very often, critics treat health as a moral issue. Like, if people do get seriously ill, they're at fault for not taking care of themselves. Except that, if you only ever get medical attention when you're too sick to ignore whatever's going on, you can't really take care of your own health properly. So the system is set up to make people sick, and then people ask them why they didn't look after themselves.

Evil is correct.

[krinndnz]

It's very closely related to the way Americans treat poverty as a moral issue. Even if that were remotely related to reality, the system that we have now punishes people for being poor with more poverty, stabbing them in the chest economically, sabotaging more and more deeply their ability to extract themselves from the low-income death spiral.

'scuse my rant.

[zingerella]

Rant away, compadre.