Re:As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
by isostatic on Sunday July 02, 2017 @05:39AM
(#14681712)
Your government funded health care budget alone would be enough to pay for a free-at-the-point-of-use system for the entire population like the UK.
Yes, all the inefficiencies would have to go, and that would mean people would have to get jobs that are more efficient and produce more bang for buck. That's life.
Re:As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
by makomk on Sunday July 02, 2017 @01:43PM
(#14683487)
Maybe if the entire population was like the UK this might work - Americans are rather less healthy in general - and one of the "inefficiencies" the UK system does away with is paying for treatments that offer particularly bad value for money, so you'd have to tell a bunch of cancer patients that tough, they're not getting chemo, now go and die quietly, and even then it's not clear whether UK levels of cost efficiency are even possible in the US.
Re:As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
by isostatic on Sunday July 02, 2017 @06:59PM
(#14684751)
NICE is no different to insurance companies when it comes to hiding the value of a given drug. For cancer patients not given chemo, you're thinking of the US when your credit card bounces and you get dragged out of hospital.
I'm not aware of any cases when people are denied chaemotheropy on the NHS, yet I am aware of people in the Us struggling to pay $50k a year for something as basic as insulin.
Concluding disingenuous is more than a stretch. I'm reading & responding to more than a dozen posts in this same thread.
Claiming we could reduce Medicare spending by 40% is a very, very dramatic claim. We could reduce general healthcare spending by a similar amount: the consequences of doing so are profound, involving vast job loss, pay cuts, and tax base loss. What's your near-term fix for that immense dislocation that would take decades to play out? Just tell the millions of people that will be negatively affected by it to suck it up and deal with it? Or do you plan to significantly boost welfare programs, unemployment benefits, retraining spending, etc. - and how do you plan to pay for that (cutting Medicare spending by 40% wouldn't even balance the budget deficit, which is set to balloon massively due to entitlement costs)?