This one’s a few days old, but I thought it was a good read.
[…] He dismissed the “idea that the American model of private insurance is uniquely evil and engaged in acts of social violence because it denies people too much treatment,” maintaining that all insurance systems, public or private, ration care.
But as I noted in the earlier FAIR article, the Commonwealth Fund (NBC, 9/19/24) found that the US system does, in fact, stand out among other peer nations, ranking “as the worst performer among 10 developed nations in critical areas of healthcare.” Those areas the US falls short in include “preventing deaths, access (mainly because of high cost) and guaranteeing quality treatment for everyone.” The rest of the world is doing better than us on these scores, contrary to Douthat.
Americans see the systems working in the rest of the world and know that the United States could have a better healthcare regime, but that corporate and government leaders simply choose not to.
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I cancelled my NYT sub and wrote, among many things, that Bret Stephens article was absolute bullshit.
On the feedback survey I received later asking if I’d come back, I repeated myself.
They offered a discount and I said fuck off.
I know it’s probably whatever, but I guess part of me hopes someone actually reads them.
but I guess part of me hopes someone actually reads them.
Unfortunately, that’s incredibly unlikely these days, unless there’s a mass exodus. Everything is automated now. They don’t give two shits about the individual, or even the subscription of thousands of individuals. It has to significantly lower their revenue for them to take notice or read any feedback.
america’s system doesn’t cover everyone, and still costs twice as much per capita.
we could literally halve our overall health care expenditures as a nation, deny fewer services, treatments and drugs, and cover more people (everyone).
while that extra $2.4 trillion a year no longer spent on health care profits would be one helluva booster shot for the economy.
Why do you hate working people?
We can’t afford to pay for our own health care with our own labor.
Are you not paying for it with your labor now? Do you think your employer is covering the cost out of the kindness of their heart? If you stop working, will they still provide coverage?
Or am I getting wooshed on a bad joke?
People close to me still talk about people coming to the United States for specialized care they can’t get elsewhere, or in a timely manner. This “fact” seems to displace ANY criticism of the system. Every. Single. Time.
Pretty weird that none of my English family has come to America to seek medical treatment. I wonder why they would chose an NHS hospital in Manchester instead of flying to Houston for Top Quality™️ care at the Medical Center there. Very interesting how the powers that be always want to compare our healthcare system to countries with GDP half of West Virginia instead of peer states like Germany, Japan, and the UK.
The US has the highest preventable death rate of any developed country. Those are deaths for which there is treatment but for whatever reason the treatment was not applied.
You can not square that with, “but every system rations care!” There’s rationing and there’s starvation diets.
It’s not JUST rationing, either.
Some of it is the HMO stupid shit we’ve let ourselves be subject to.
As an example, I was hospitalized with heart failure. It was great: insurance paid for everything and it was all nicely taken care of.
Except, after leaving the hospital, I had some vision issues.
I had to go to my PCP, who sent me to an ophthalmologist, who sent me to an eye surgeon, who sent me to a neurologist, who sent me back to the ophthalmologist, who sent me back to the eye surgeon, who then referred me for imaging, and then scheduled and performed a surgery that fixed my shit.
This sounds like a victory for medical science, except for one itty bitty teeny weeny little problem: it took 17 months to do that.
Had this been something other than ‘I went cross-eyed’, and way more serious, then yes, the odds of dying in that time would probably be pretty damn high.
Try all they want, they’re not putting this cat back in the bag.
They will. They’ll start saturating the news about immigrants eating cats, or about how liberals are trying to turn your kids into transvetites, or something to turn groups within the classes against each other… and it’ll work. It has before. Remember Occupy Wall Street? It started out with conservative right wingers side-by-side with lesbian feminists, and it didn’t take any effort at all before all of the infighting destroyed the movement. Since then, the blue collar vs liberal rhetoric has been amped up so much, fucking Trump got elected a second time.
This too shall pass, and at the end, you’ll be paying premiums for no benefits because it’ll be illegal to not to.
They mocked “Sheeple” until it was widely accepted as absurd, but Sheeple is the fundamental truth. Led as lambs to slaughter.
