The US has preventable death rate in the developed world. People die because they don't get to see a doctor. First responders will save you. However, the amount of deaths because people couldn't pay is massive for a so-called developed country. Have diabetes and no insurance? That's pretty much a death sentence and they'll watch you die. Need surgery? No insurance? No surgery and death because of complications caused by the lack of surgery.
> Unincorporated land holds a very tiny percentage of the population of the US; trying to use this as an analogy for the rest of society is just disingenuous.
As used with the multiple other examples, it's an entire culture. Not just "Oh unincorporated land, that's just crazy". It's disingenuous to act like my point is hinged on unincorporated land.
> So does the US. Even unincorporated land falls under the jurisdiction of whatever county it happens to be in as well as the state and federal governments; the only difference is it doesn't have a local town government... because there is no local town.
There are state troopers who have jurisction over certaint things. However, there is then an array of other law enforcement agencies such as towns having a police department and sheriff departments which have jurisictions over certain things. They don't have a simple police force that deals with everything in that area. This results in crimes not being truly investigated because no one is sure whose job it is.
There is no regional fire department as shown in the linked news article. The fire department that was paid by a neighbour to ensure they didn't get fire damage ignored a fire nearby because they weren't paid by someone else. The ignoring of that fire resulted in fire damage to the paying customer. A regional fire department would have dealt with that.
They also have by far the highest obesity rate in the developed world.
> Have diabetes and no insurance? That's pretty much a death sentence and they'll watch you die. Need surgery? No insurance? No surgery and death because of complications caused by the lack of surgery.
I'm supportive of universal healthcare, but this is a huge exaggeration. If policy decisions are motivated by uninformed memes like this, then if we ever do get universal healthcare, it will be a disaster.
You can buy human insulin for $25 a vial at Walmart. It's not as good, but it's what people used a couple decades ago. Countries with nationalized healthcare often have long backlogs for treatments. The cancer backlog in the UK is over 2 million people and it's continuing to grow [1]. Also, if you are insured, you're typically going to get new and more sophisticated treatments on the US compared to most places with nationalized healthcare.
[1] https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2020/06/01/over-2-million-...
>> They also have by far the highest obesity rate in the developed world.
So... I am sure that is one reason of the highest preventable death rate. doesn't invalidate GP point.
> I'm supportive of universal healthcare, but this is a huge exaggeration.
Sadly in a way its not an exaggeration at all, will doctors and nurses literally watch you die of course not. If you go into the ER they legally have to stabilize you. But that's it. If I have cancer and and really sick, If they take to me to the ER, they will stabilize me but they want start treating the cancer. Even if its still early, they will watch you die over time as the cancer advances and makes you worse.
To be fair, I am certain the doctors and nurses want to treat you. But the hospital won't/can't allow it for bullshit reasons.
> You can buy human insulin for $25 a vial at Walmart. It's not as good, but it's what people used a couple decades ago.
I can't believe your defending poor people having to use worse insulin. How is that okay for you? We are talking about peoples lives, can the richest country on earth aim a little higher then throwing decades old medical knowledge at poor people to shut them up?
> I'm supportive of universal healthcare,
No you aren't, after that claim about supporting it, you spend the rest of your post shooting down universal healthcare.
> Countries with nationalized healthcare often have long backlogs for treatments. The cancer backlog in the UK is over 2 million people and it's continuing to grow [1].
> Also, if you are insured, you're typically going to get new and more sophisticated treatments on the US compared to most places with nationalized healthcare.
The UK has its issue, but from what I can see its because they are purposely starving it of money so they can ultimately privatize it.
America's health care is fucking garbage. There is no defending it, I'm so tired of spending my time calling several different companies to figure out why I am getting billed for something I shouldn't be. I'm not exaggerating either, literally one or twice a month I get the joy of calling my insurance and whatever doctor sent the bill and try and solve why my insurance won't cover it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/aids.suzannego...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_Corporation_of_America#...
Oh boy, Wells Fargo is so shitty, most of their page is about their various scandals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo#Lawsuits,_fines_an...
While not all are directly related to healthcare or the FDA, I present this 3 articles as evidence that corporations don't give a shit about you and unless they are kept in check they will happily sell you a faulty or bad product to help their bottom line.
I can produce many many more articles of various scandals if you want. There is plenty of them. Reducing regulation does nothing, but help corporations provide even worse health care to people.
Healthcare should not nor ever be for profit. Its an inelastic good, the so called "free market" doesn't even apply to it.
Bullshit reasons like they don't want to go bankrupt and not be able to serve anyone at all?
I got news for you its going to happen regardless, turns out trying to extract as much profit from healthcare as possible is a terrible idea.
Hospitals closing down
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/11/28/23424682/...
https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2022/11/22/rural-ho...
Or they can't afford to be staffed fully
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/us-hospitals-are-so-...
For profit health care is a scam and the US healthcare system is failing rapidly. And its only getting worse.
This isn't true. Healthcare spending has grown every year and has never significantly fallen relative to GDP. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
> America's health care is fucking garbage.
I agree, but it's not for a lack of spending. The US government actually spends more per capita on healthcare than the UK in total. I'm not opposed to universal healthcare. I'm opposed to politicians throwing money at a problem to buy votes, but that is the only thing that can result from a universal policy that results from healthcare at all costs rhetoric.
No it's not. There are reports constantly of people dying in the US because they tried to get their insulin to last them multiple days and ended up dying. Not everyone has $25. But your post that they can just buy it for $25 proves the point earlier of "They didn't pay, so they die".
The problem with these emotionally charged characterizations is that they can be used against you. Conservatives will use the rationing caused by large cancer backlog in the UK as evidence for "death panels."
The US, quite famously, generally has the highest cancer survival rates in the world. The standard bearers for cancer survival rates in Europe have traditionally been Switzerland and France, which are close to the same level as the US. A decade ago in the UK there was a public outcry when studies showed it had one of the poorest cancer survival rates in the developed world; in the well-known Lancet study, survival rates in the US were 50% higher than the UK.
The UK has improved their cancer survival rates significantly over the last decade in response to those studies but it isn't near the top tier.
In the US, everyone gets essentially the same cancer treatments, even if they are poor. The economic stratification occurs around enrollment in experimental cancer treatments, by virtue of needing to be located where experimental therapies are being tested. Experimental therapies are a big deal in the US because most state-of-the-art treatments are developed and tested there before being widely available. If you want to enroll in experimental cancer treatments outside of where they are being tested, you need to have the economic means to travel there. I personally know people on welfare in the US who survived Stage 4 cancer because they happened to live where highly effective experimental cancer therapies were being tested, making it readily available to them.
The US lives a little bit in the future for state-of-the-art cancer treatments. I know several people that survived cancer in the US thanks to experimental therapies that are now standard therapies. It usually takes a while for these to propagate to other parts of the world.
The segment of the US with most challenging cost problems are the lower-middle class. Not poor enough for the government to pay for everything while also being at risk of having little or no insurance. For people comfortably in the middle-class and up, this is much less likely to be the case.
The overall story is complicated. Demographics and health matter (not great in the US). The US medical system is profligate about speculative and preventative diagnostic tests which catch more cancers earlier (at great cost). But also early access to rapidly improving cancer treatments. It all blends together into the top-line numbers.
Where are the "reports constantly of people dying in the US because they tried to get their insulin to last them multiple days and ended up dying"? There are isolated cases where someone doesn't take care of it and dies, but it isn't widespread.
Maybe take a break from the propaganda you're reading (In Ireland, I assume?).
This is the bare minimum to avoid a PR disaster. When someone is dying slowing of a chronic condition (diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease) the US system will just watch them die unless they have insurance.
(This is, to my mind, what caused the United States to end up with socialized medicine-- albeit a socialized medicine system where we don't get to have public discourse about how it works.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
Uninsured and under-insured people are cited as one reason why treatment costs are so high. Whether these cases actually contribute to costs in a substantive way doesn't stop the mandate to provide free emergency care being used as a political football.
This is like a burger joint telling you they don't serve onion rings, and then you insisting that in fact they do, because they put circle-cut onions on their burgers, and technically those are both rings and onions. Like... OK? So what? Which framing: "this place serves onion rings", or "this place does NOT serve onion rings", is more likely to confuse a diner?
The only times I've seen people really, seriously try to frame this as "socialized medicine" is when they don't understand how very limited the mandated scope of care is. It doesn't amount to much more than "you can't let someone simply die or give birth on the curb right outside your ER". The vast majority of what counts as medical care isn't part of it.
Where I live, in a rural area of a red state with a lot of wealth disparity, giving free medical care to anybody absolutely is seen as "socialized medicine". (Of course, there'll be a healthy dose of divisive racial and class politics mixed in to the argument, too.) The reasons behind that opinion are absolutely motivated by lack of understanding, but there are strong political beliefs there as well.
I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just die" has a good moral argument behind it.
Suburb in a red state here, grew up mostly in rural red America, so I get what you mean. I'm sure there's also a lot of thinking that free ER care is a lot more expansive than it really is, and belief that "welfare types" (ahem, cough, cough, lay-finger-along-side-of-nose) regularly use ERs to get ordinary healthcare for free. As is usually the case, I expect laying out what's actually available and how the mandate actually works tends to soften resistance to it. I'm well aware that the Left does some of this too, but god I wish right-wing media would stop misleading Republicans about how basic things like social-safety-net programs and taxes work. The death of the Fairness Doctrine, however not-entirely-comfortable I may be with the thing, has been a curse on this country, in practice.
> I'd like to see substantive discussion about how the US healthcare "system" really works. This is a detail that a lot of people don't know about or understand. I think the idea that "we already don't let people who can't pay just die" has a good moral argument behind it.
Ugh, tell me about it. I especially think the enormous proportion of medical spending that's already public isn't well-understood enough. Especially since some of those tend to cover some of the most expensive demographics—the elderly, the disabled, soldiers. Failure to grasp how our current system already works leads to those infamous "keep government out of my medicare!" protest signs and, more importantly, failure to appreciate that shifting to cover everyone with one variety or another of government-funded healthcare is actually a far less radical shift than some seem to suppose it is.
Sorry if I pounced on you there, BTW. I could have been less confrontational with that previous post.
It's good. The nerd pedant in me can't let a mention of EMTALA go by without hammering on it. It's a bit of cognitive dissonance to inflict on the "free healthcare market"-types who have moral qualms about letting people die but aren't about to give an inch on "socialism".
They will stabilize you and then kick you out to the curb quickly. And depending how they felt that day they will send you an outrageous bill.
Patients get discharged when doctors say so.
> This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize anyone, regardless of ability to pay.
It's weird that you think you've offered a retort here. A person who cannot afford medical treatment and experiences one or more of these emergency room visits followed by immediate discharge as soon as legally permissible is likely to die before their time, perhaps shortly after being discharged.
> First responders- police, ambulance, fire fighters- will save any life they are able to.
They do that sometimes when it suits them, but they certainly aren't legally obligated to.
This isn't a thing in the US. Hospitals will stabilize anyone, regardless of ability to pay. First responders- police, ambulance, fire fighters- will save any life they are able to. Preventative health care is a different story, and even that is complicated.
Unincorporated land holds a very tiny percentage of the population of the US; trying to use this as an analogy for the rest of society is just disingenuous.
> Other countries have orginisations that deal with entire areas.
So does the US. Even unincorporated land falls under the jurisdiction of whatever county it happens to be in as well as the state and federal governments; the only difference is it doesn't have a local town government... because there is no local town.