Almost 100 Million People a Year 'Forced To Choose Between Food and Healthcare' (theguardian.com) 415
Almost 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty each year because of debts accrued through healthcare expenses. From a report: A report, published by the World Health Organization and the World Bank this week, found the poorest and most vulnerable people are routinely forced to choose between healthcare and other necessities for their household, including food and education, subsisting on $1.90 a day. Researchers found that more than 122 million people around the world are forced to live on $3.10 a day, the benchmark for "moderate poverty," due to healthcare expenditure. Since 2000, this number has increased by 1.5% a year. A total of 800 million people spend more than 10% of their household budgets on "out-of-pocket" health expenses, defined as costs not covered by insurance. Almost 180 million people spend a quarter or more, a population increasing at a rate of almost 5% per year, with women among those worst affected.
Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
People dropping out of the insurance market and having no coverage won't solve this problem. The solution is to finally have our country behave like a modern industrialized nation and have a single-payer system. It's too bad nobody was willing to propose such a sensible thing. [berniesanders.com]
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Single-payer would bankrupt the country. There will never be enough of anything to satisfy demand completely.
The solution is to relax regulations, not increase them. Remove the artificial limits placed on the number of doctors by the AMA, relax the burdens on licensing, etc. Cap malpractice payouts through tort reform.
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This is so dangerously stupid.
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Why exactly is dangerous and stupid?
You think this idea is wrong, but I believe there to be evidence that this *could* be at least partially right on some points.
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Why exactly is dangerous and stupid?
I sense presence of the libertarian shibboleth that the free market will fix everything. That is what is dangerous and stupid.
Also the reliance on shaky facts, common among libertarians. I don't want to get into a long discussion but let's just pick out one since it was mentioned:
Cap malpractice payouts through tort reform.
This has always been an appeal to emotion rather than reliance on actual facts and figures. My dad was a personal injury lawyer for 60 years and had gotten record-setting multimilion dollar malpractice settlements. Outrageous?
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
Single-payer would bankrupt the country. There will never be enough of anything to satisfy demand completely.
Well, I just can't understand how most of Europe and Canada do it without actually going bankrupt.
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Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet everyone gets their insulin in Canada. I can't say the same for USA.
There is limiting services through budget constraints that are applied broadly. And there is limited services by not providing any services to lower class people. Which model do you think we have in the US?
In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay (Score:2, Informative)
In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay if you don't have a med plan and they can't turn you away.
Re:In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay (Score:5, Insightful)
And the rest of us absorb those costs. That's another reason why prices are out of control.
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I refuse to care for people? Who are you caring for? Why do you feel entitled to have other people support you?
Re:In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay (Score:5, Informative)
In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay if you don't have a med plan and they can't turn you away.
That is not entirely true. If you are having a medical emergency the ER cannot turn you away for lack of insurance but that doesn't mean they can't bill you for coming in - and they will. They're just limited in how far they can go with their attempts to collect on fees before they hand them over to the government.
Furthermore as already pointed out the hospital only needs to stabilize you. If you need an organ transplant and you have no insurance, that simply won't happen. If you went in because you were suicidal you'll be kept for a couple days and then sent right back out.
This nonsense again (Score:5, Informative)
The ER has to try to stabilize you. They don't have to provide needed treatment beyond that, or drugs — and they won't. What they will do is determine what will stabilize you, do that, give you perhaps one dose of whatever prescription(s) is(are) needed which you can then go get from a pharmacy if you can pay for it, and refer you to a doctor, who you can also go to if you can pay for it, and that's the end of it.
You have cancer? Diabetes? A hernia? You're not going to get the treatment you need for that at the ER. Period. The ER does things that are specific to the moment, like set a broken arm. Still, you get to pay for the meds, and any follow-up care.
ER visits are not even remotely comparable to appropriate medical care for anything serious. People who claim it is have no idea what they are talking about.
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In the USA you just show up at ER and don't pay if you don't have a med plan and they can't turn you away.
I believe that's called the illegal alien plan. It passes the costs onto the rest of us who actually do pay.
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and they can't force you to show an ID and can't turn away people with fake ones.
the idiot can't google (Score:3, Informative)
www.businessinsider.com/insulin-prices-increased-in-2017-2017-5
"It's led some people living with diabetes to turn to the black market, crowdfunding pages, and Facebook pages to get access to the life-saving drug."
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
You could have googled it pretty easily.
https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/a... [vice.com]
http://www.kaaltv.com/news/mot... [kaaltv.com]
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s... [cbsnews.com]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... [nytimes.com]
https://www.indystar.com/story... [indystar.com]
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We could use some spackle for the cracks but "be like Canada" is a really stupid approach.
Yeah, except that Canada seems to have better health outcomes than the USA does. With some exceptions, waiting times are not unreasonable across the country, and patient satisfaction rates are significantly higher than in the US. Sure, they aren't perfect, and there are many areas that could be improved, but to paint it as an unmitigated disaster is disingenuous.
Of course the US already spends about twice the per-capita rate for healthcare as Canada, so maybe the US could just do the Canadian system and spe
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
What you call propaganda is simply truth.
I'm a jr. doctor in Sweden and our (single payer) healthcare costs per capita are way less than the US (even though we rank way up there in costs). Sure, we do have long queues for some diagnostics, especially when the illness in question is not life threatening (such as back pain, which btw generally just gets better on its own in a few years, no treatment other than acetaminophen or some other mild painkiller required). That said, implying as others in these comments have that single payer systems skip cancer tests and other life threatening diagnostic tools is not only misleading, but often based on ignorance or plain lies. Doctors here have full authority to order any damn test we like, the life of the patient goes before all else, anyone telling you different has no clue.
In short, the us system of insurance is inefficient (poor people often can't pay for regular check ups which increase costs when they do have to go to the ER), expensive (find any list of healthcare spending per capita, then remember that you don't even cover all of your citizens) and finally just plain unethical (if you can't figure out why, you're a shitty human being).
Ps. We even have private health care in Sweden, it's just funded publicly. So spare me the "socialist commie" bullshit. And yes, arguing about this makes me mad, which doesn't happen often.
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Vermont tried it (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I just can't understand how most of Europe and Canada do it without actually going bankrupt.
By starting 50 or 75 years ago and keeping costs from rising year after year up until the present.
Vermont tried to go single-payer a couple years ago. They couldn’t make it work [dallasnews.com] because there was no way for them to cut doctor and nurse salaries enough to make the financing work out.
If you want to understand, start by learning from Vermont's experience.
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It wouldn't have worked because they couldn't stop people from neighboring states from flooding in.
Yeah, that's the problem with giving people something for "free" isn't it?
Vermont could easily have added a residency requirement. That doesn't solve the problem. Even if no new people show up, it's still astronomically expensive. And the only way to make it much cheaper is to significantly cut compensation for health care workers and keep them from rising.
Everything else is a few percentage points that might get you back to the cost levels from 3 or 4 years ago. (And you remember 3 to 4 years ago right
Re: Don't be mistaken (Score:2)
Single payer would bankrupt the country if we left the system as it is today, which is ludicrous.
Show of hands: Who here thinks charging someone $2k for 10 minutes in an MRI sounds fair ?
How about $20k / hour for a surgery ?
$30k for a ride on life-flight ?
$150k for a thirty day hospital stay ?
$200k for a round of chemo ?
These numbers aren't made up folks. They are quite real. Can you afford it as they are today ?
The fix is simple: As part of the plan to go single payer, you first have to regulate how muc
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I just can't understand how most of Europe and Canada do it without actually going bankrupt.
It's because US people put up a straw man and cut it down. A single payer system means it's funded almost entirely by taxes (here in Norway co-pay is ~$30/visit and capped at ~$250/year), it doesn't mean they got infinite money or resources and it doesn't mean they deliver everything the patients want or need. There's only so many hospitals, doctors and nurses as the budget permits. Treatments are granted based on medical need and ranked based on quality-adjusted years of life. Waiting lists are prioritized on urgency and impact. It's not the best care money can buy, it's trying to be the most fairly distributed level of care possible at that funding level.
Single payer doesn't mean exclusively public employees, there are many private doctors and institutions delivering services into the public system. But apart from that there's also truly private insurance and private healthcare, if you can afford it. It's not subsidized, you don't get a tax refund and it caters to a market that won't wait and won't take anything less than excellence. LIke if a pro sports player is injured and need surgery, they often use that because in the public system they're not special and you can't pay to get to the head of the line. Same way some people bankroll certain medications we've rejected to give because of cost, typically >$100k/year. Even though they're medically proven to work and the patient will die sooner.
So if it's not a happy wonderland, why is it working better? Because we don't have insurance people trying to save costs by denying coverage. We don't have doctors that earn more by billing more or get kickbacks from selling brand drugs. While there's an ever ongoing pressure to reduce costs, we're not looking to cherry pick profitable patients and hospitals don't get stuck with unprofitable ones. For the most part we simply have medical personnel and administrators trying to balance out the limited resources based on who needs it most. And they're actually pretty good at it, as long as they don't get other personal incentives.
Just to take one example, there's a national standard for average ambulance response time which says it should be <12 minutes in >90% of the cases in urban areas and <25 minutes in >90% of the cases in rural areas. Poor or rich area? Easy or hard geography? Doesn't really matter. The money is distributed so it's mostly uniform no matter where you live, we're not quite hitting that metric but then we'd rather fall a little short most places rather than fail spectacularly in a few. Those are the stretch goals, on the low end you have a standard of adequate healthcare which is like a legal minimum. It's a pretty low bar though where violations are usually human error, flaws or failures in the system like say no ambulance is actually dispatched. It's not your typical triage.
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
Countries with single-payer health care have better medical outcomes and longer life expectancy.
https://www.oecd.org/els/healt... [oecd.org]
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Perhaps the US should adopt the Canadian Immigration policies.
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OTOH. here in BC, just last night I had to take a friend to emergency (puking and shitting blood). There was a twenty minute or so wait and took him an hour or so to be in a room with most of that time spent with 4 nurses trying to get an IV in him, his veins were pretty collapsed.
The other week, my sister had to be admitted for what turned out to be double by-pass surgery. Basically from her doctors office to a bed in the hospital and surgery 2 days later.
Last time I went to emergency, I did have quite a w
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US imperialism is solely to the benefit of the capitalists who which to control the regions like in Syria which has nothing to do with liberating the people and everything to do with a gas pipeline that competes with Russia as Russia is funding their own with their ally Assad.
Now do you get why there is all this Russian xenophobia all of a sudden? Why we are arming Al Queda(the 9/11 guys) to overthrow Assad?
Its all bullshit
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Guess what happens to all those European oil and mining companies after the US soldiers pack up & go home?
Oh, everyone likes to ignore that Norway was drilling for oil in Iraq in 2004 before the blood had dried.
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Because America pays for their defense, and they are free to put the vast savings into a welfare state. Europe flat out refuses to pay their minimum share of NATO, 2%, because this would bankrupt them and their people would revolt. It's easy to pay for nice things when you don't have to find a hugely expensive military to defend the borders of other nations while neglecting your own borders.
Which is exactly why the US should pull back. Focus on solving our own problems. Like Switzerland but without the shady tax haven / banker angle.
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Single payer removes a middleman that is of no value added, and in fact raises the total cost of healthcare.
And, for whatever it's worth, I'm saying this as a fiscal conservative.
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Single payer removes a middleman that is of no value added
How is a government bureaucrat paying a doctor less of a middleman than an insurance company bureaucrat paying a doctor?
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Medical insurance companies tell the hospitals what they can charge for any given procedure based on the individual plan the customer has purchased. Depending on your plan the the cost of the procedure and the copay will differ. There are only two major health care insurance providers in the US. On the west coast this is Bluecross/Blueshield for instance. Every other provider is a reseller of their products who make money by slightly changing the packages and adding things like vision and dental (also p
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That's a lot of text, but it doesn't make a government payer not a middleman.
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So no structural incentive to control costs then. Or keep customers happy. But still a middleman who has to be paid a salary out of the total, instead of spending that money on actual care.
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Bullshit. You've just changed the middleman to a government bureaucrat.
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
Single-payer would bankrupt the country.
Just because the GOP says that, doesn't make it true. The rest of the industrialized world uses some form of single-payer and their nations aren't going broke. We use a market-based system with essentially no floor and we are going broke. We are the only industrialized nation where it is even possible to go bankrupt due to medical debt.
The solution is to relax regulations, not increase them
Single payer does relax regulations. The biggest barriers to health care right now come from the insurance industry, not the government.
Remove the artificial limits placed on the number of doctors by the AMA
You really need to look in to what you're saying. Several problems exist with that statement.
First of all, we have alternative paths to practicing medicine. Ever hear of a Nurse Practitioner? They are able to practice medicine on their own now in several states. Ever hear of a Physician's Assistant? They are taking patients independently for routine cases in many states as well. Ever hear of a Doctor of Osteopathic medicine? They can also see patients on their own. We also have pharmacists who can do more patient care than before in many situations - they are doing a lot more now than just handing out prescriptions and selling Sudafed.
Do you really want someone practicing medicine who has less qualifications than that?
Cap malpractice payouts through tort reform.
Malpractice payouts are a trivial expense compared to what goes to the top of the insurance industry. In fact most doctors pay vastly more in malpractice insurance than they will ever pay in malpractice settlements. The reason why so few doctors go in to Obstetrics (for example) isn't because they are actually concerned about the possibility of committing malpractice, but because the insurance industry requires them to carry absurd terms for their malpractice insurance. Sure, the lawyers are getting a big cut but it is dwarfed again by what the insurance company execs get - and the insurance execs get it regardless of their own performance while the lawyers have to prove a case in court to get the big paycheck.
In other words the bulk of your argument reads like an ad for the insurance industry.
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
If the GOP were in charge of single-payer, they'd make it true.
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Why did California scrap their proposed single-payer plan a few months ago? Because it would have bankrupted the state. California!
That is a sweeping over-generalization. Have you read the proposed bill? I expect not. Have you actually bothered to listen to the comments from any of its authors? I expect you haven't done that either.
In fact, based on your reply I can't see any reason to suspect you even bothered to read my earlier reply to you. Do you actually want to participate in a discussion or do you just want to throw talking points at me?
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
Single-payer would bankrupt the country. There will never be enough of anything to satisfy demand completely.
The solution is to relax regulations, not increase them. Remove the artificial limits placed on the number of doctors by the AMA, relax the burdens on licensing, etc. Cap malpractice payouts through tort reform.
Its not bankrupted any other first world country which has universal healthcare free at the point of need. The tax burden per capita of the UK NHS is the same as the tax burden per capita in the USA for Medicare and Medicaid yet the NHS covers 100% of the population. It may not be perfect but people don't have to make the choice between getting treatment and eating.
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
Do you know why the UK can negotiate better rates than the US? Because the country negotiates as a single entity and if a drug isn't offered at a reasonable rate then the company may find that they lose their right to sell the drug at all. In contrast, individual hospitals in the USA negotiate rates separately and (on top of having little bargaining power) have little incentive to negotiate good rates because they're going to pass on the costs directly to the insurance companies.
The fact that the US moving to single payer and negotiating drug rates centrally would push up the cost of healthcare in other countries is a pretty weak argument to advance to US health insurance payers as to why they should keep being overcharged.
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Your solution is to not require medicines get vigorously tested before being prescribed?
Or to not be able to sue the bejesus out of the surgeon who accidentally amputates the wrong leg?
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I worked for a short stint at a medical company. They developed tests for cognitive ability to be used during medical trials. I automated QA for a web interface.
Their entire process was stilted by a need to generated literally several reams of paper in an attempt to overwhelm "investigators". I use quotes, because the FDA people would come in and make comments like a sheet of the eight page "script" was not signed, or was signed but the date was missing. I'm saying that the FDA people added actually zer
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Lawsuits are the punishment to insure they're doing their jobs correctly.
There aren't any "successful treatment lawsuits", but there are "malpractice" lawsuits galore.
Here is the definition of Malpractice from Dictionary.com:
Law. failure of a professional person, as a physician or lawyer, to render proper services through reprehensible ignorance or negligence or through criminal intent, especially when injury or loss follows.
Should I go on and look up "reprehensible", "ignorance", "negligence", and "injury"
I've always been deeply opposed (Score:2)
Oh, fyi, payouts for medical malpractice, according to this [getreferralmd.com] very pro tort reform (I hate calling it that) website are only $3.6 billion. This is
Hollywood Upstairs Medical College (Score:2)
Is the party med school.
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How many doctors get successfully sued? What happens to THAT small percentage of doctors?
The thing your statistic misses is that only a small percentage of the doctors make up that .3%, but those doctors are totally destroyed. In response, the doctors that are NOT part of that .3% go to extraordinary lengths, unreasonably expensive lengths, to make sure they don't wind up part of that .3%.
It's the tail wagging the dog, like how we all have to get cavity searched to ride an airplane, because of a few box k
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Single-payer would bankrupt the country. There will never be enough of anything to satisfy demand completely.
The solution is to relax regulations, not increase them. Remove the artificial limits placed on the number of doctors by the AMA, relax the burdens on licensing, etc. Cap malpractice payouts through tort reform.
That depends on many factors. Are we talking about health care for US citizens or for illegals also? Are we talking about paying the highest cost in the world for the same medications or do we get prices on par with Canada? If we restrict the conversation to US citizens and we treat it as an engineering problem and intelligently attack it I'm confident it could be solved. If instead we get distracted by politics and political correctness (ie is the diversity enough, lobbyist companies get higher no bid
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How is capping malpractice payouts relaxing regulations? If you want to cut cost by removing regulations, remove the regulations that reduce competition by making the FDA approval process completely tax subsidized and provide a public option that disregards patent awarding contracts to third parties to produce a subset of the most expe
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Don't be a shitty doctor, and you won't get sued. It is literally that easy.
Do you think 100% of lawsuits against doctors are reasonable? That is an extraordinary claim. It presumes no one who seeks medical care, and gets a bad outcome due to the limits of medicine and/or bad luck is not willing to cry in front of a jury to get several million dollars.
I live and work with humans. I can report to you that at least 10% of people do something that makes them a jerk at least once a week. People who think they have been wronged in some way (such as going to the doctor and not gettin
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Yep...one cost of increased US health care is Dr's running multiple tests to CYA against a lawsuit...when usually 1-2 would suffice. But, medicine is NOT an exact science, and occasionally a test misses something or false negative. I
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Single payer would not bankrupt America. How about cutting your fucked up military budget? Lol. Omg the US used to really be a beacon and now it's just a fucked up mess.
Really? Having the government fork over 14% of GDP could be covered by the military budget? I think you GREATLY over estimate what we spend on the military. Something like 3.5% of GDP. So yea, let's zero out the defense budget and have single payer... NOT possible.
And.. Have you considered what situation we'd be in without a military?
Re: Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Funny)
We can't possibly know for sure.
I mean, if any other developed country had implemented it, or even something close (especially in difficult times, like after being bombed to shit by the Germans), we could like look at them or something.
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How can we NOT know this? There are multiple examples of other countries with people and less wealth per-capita (so they get less economy of scale while having less to spend per person) who do this quite readily.
I love using canada as an example here. US spend for healthcare is $8233PP while Canada with universal healthcare is a mere 4445. Multiply THEIR rate by OUR population and you could cover the whole US for an additional $400BB. Not cheap, but not impractical by any means given we wast^^^^spend $6
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I'm not saying it isn't a problem, but if you divide out the CEO compensation by the number of insured people, you'll find it isn't going to be that significant. I'll do the math for you if you reply with the most egregious health care CEO salary you can find.
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You get compensated for risk, responsibility, and skill. I'm generally OK with that, except that mostly we see that word 'responsibility' being seen as a perfect synonym for 'authority', which it is not.
And the risk? Well, your risk is that your obscene (to most people) income will be temporarily interrupted until your peers install you in the next available slot... and you get a big payout to cover your expenses until that happens. And even if it all somehow goes completely to shit, you still have so mu
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not how much they draw compared to each person, it's how much they draw in total. It is, in fact, obscene.
Considering this thread was started with the statement: "The reason health care is so costly in the US can be found at the top of the insurance companies.", the only thing that matters is how much they draw compared to each person. For the purposes of this discussion that is. Whether or not their pay is obscene has no bearing on whether or not it is the reason health care is so costly in the US, which is the contention which was being refuted by the post you replied to.
Based on the figures I found here [propertycasualty360.com] the top 10 highest paid insurance CEO's made $159 million in 2014. That is about $1.30 per household. I don't think health care costs are so high just because of an extra ten cents per month we all pay extra to pay these CEO's.
If I use Amtrust Financial Services (home of the highest paid CEO above) as a model, the entire C-level suite including the CEO made 261% of the CEO's pay. So I'll estimate that the C-level suite at the 10 companies above were paid $415 million in 2014, which is about a quarter per household per month.
If you factor in every C-level executive in every insurance company in the US, I doubt you would come to more than a couple dollars per household per month. That is not why insurance is so expensive. I would still agree that private insurance companies are the number one reason why health care is so expensive in the US but it has far more to do with the stockholders who demand return on investment (gasp, the horror) than it does with obscene CEO pay.
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>off topic.
My reply was perfectly on-topic to the content of the post I was replying to.
>Now, can you please post your off-topic socialist grandstanding spam someplace else?
Instead of that... how about you take your attitude and shove it right up your ass?
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And what justification do you have for dividing the CEO compensation by the number of insured people, rather than dividing the CEO compensation by the number of CEOs? Sure, you can make any big number small by dividing it by a big number.
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Sure, take the total compensation of all CEOs of all healthcare companies, then divide by the number of insured, and the number is still small. It doesn't change anything. If you want to add it up go ahead.
Meanwhile, Google tells me this is the highest-paid healthcare CEO, at $22 million per year:
https://www.fiercehealthcare.c... [fiercehealthcare.com]
Looks like they have 12 million members:
https://www.centene.com/ [centene.com]
So, definitely the $1.83 per year that he is taking from each member is really ruining their lives.
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The largest single factor (i.e.: the group with the highest profit margins) are the pharmaceutical companies. They've been given essentially free reign, with minimal limitations an
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Currently the US subsidizes much of the world's healthcare costs.
No. The rest of the world does quite well without any such imagined subsidies.
When we pay $50 for a pill that other countries pay $5 for, we are effectively keeping many drug companies afloat, and funding their R&D, etc. If the whole world only paid $5 per pill, then it would be a problem. Either all prices would go up, or R&D would cease, etc.
Several things are wrong with that statement.
First, drug company CEOs are also disgustingly over-compensated.
Second, a very large part of the cost per pill goes in to advertising. Very few companies outside the US allow drugs to be advertised at all. In the US we see drug ads on TV, hear them on the radio, see them in the newspaper, on the sides of buses, on billboards, in magazines, etc. Few 8 year olds in the US haven'
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I don't see how that is relevant to my comment. If there was a pill that cost $1 million and helped you lose weight, would they pay for it? Or how about a $1 million pill that killed cancer?
Re:Don't be mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
This is so very wrong. As much as we would like to think we have that much effect on the world economy, the reality is that the reason why drugs are so expensive in the USA is because the pharma companies can charge as much as they want. And it is coming to light that most of them are doing just that. Most of the rest of the civilized world took one look at the potential for rent-seeking that could happen in health care and quickly put in fee schedules to keep their citizenry from being robbed blind. Did this slow down progress? Not really, since a majority of the pure research that feeds these drug companies is actually funded by public monies. By the time pharma companies actually start picking up the bill on research of a promising drug, most of the basic research is done. The majority of the private money spent by pharma companies from that point on is in the marketing of that drug. The clinical trials are actually little more than a speed bump in comparison to this. This is true whether the drug is being developed in the US, Germany, France or the UK. And a lot more research is happening in Europe and Asia than in the US right now. And that's in markets where the governments regulate the profits that pharma companies make on their products.
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In the US:
"We won't insure this procedure!"
"Fine, I'll pay cash."
"Ok, good luck."
In the UK:
"We won't permit this procedure."
"I don't need you to pay for it, I can afford it myself."
"No doctor in all of the United Kingdoms will perform it. If you're serious, go somewhere else and stop bothering us."
You are conflating two things: whether a procedure is allowed and whether it is covered. In the USA, you can't have procedures performed that the FDA doesn't approve, but you can pay a licensed surgeon to perform any operation that is permitted. The same is true of the UK (though currently the approval is done by the European regulator, so no idea what's going to happen there next year).
In the US, if your insurance doesn't cover an operation that is permitted by the FDA, then you can pay someone to per
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How big a factor is the wages of doctors and nurses in the bottom line? The cost of drugs [bloomberg.com] and supplies is much higher in US, driven up by collusion between pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and government. You also have leeches like Martin Shkreli pumping up the cost.
10% spent on out-of-pocket" health expenses? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... (Score:2)
That's one way to cure obesity I guess.
Or unemployment and homelessness.
100MM of 7.6GG people (Score:2)
That's barely 1% of the world population. I think that's damned impressive.
Whatever (Score:2)
Give all the Stats you want. In America, one of the richest country's in the world, we simply don't give a shit about Poverty or Healthcare issues and have no interest in solving them.
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Depends.
We have our own poor to take care of. I you can't solve that, than you have no business trying to solve it for the rest of the world. Do we really need to be sending money around the world when we have homeless on the streets of every major city? How about all of those veterans who still can't get help in spite of all the media attention that was brought to it over the last couple years?
Many of us who do have decent healthcare are not pleased with our premiums skyrocketing. This isn't giving us
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Depends.
Yeah - some people have to wear them.
Plan B is jail/prison (cover more then er and food (Score:2)
Plan B is jail/prison (cover more then er and free food)
News for Nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, I don't want to minimize the seriousness of this topic. It deserves discussion and action. I'm just not sure it belongs here, on this site.
I have come to /. for many years to stay up to speed on the latest tech news and other interesting news that interests me. I also follow many other sites for political content. Lately, every site has seemed to wade into politics more than usual. I understand we live in a hyper partisan environment. However, we must have some safe havens from it. This site serves as that, to some extent, for me. I would hate to see it devolve into yet another political dystopia.
This site was built for a particular niche. I don't know about the rest of you, but I would like to see it stay in the niche.
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Mod parent up. Stories like this are why I rarely read /. anymore.
There are plenty of sites for political flamewars. It would be nice if this site went back to being one for only tech-y political flamewars.
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In my country (Spain) and quite a few other ones, medical expenses rarely represent an issue
And yet your country with a pubic health care system, and my country (US) without one, are in the same boat with respect to "catstrophic spending" on health care. More info here. [worldbank.org] (PDF)
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Simple (Score:2)
I'm gonna die, and as quickly as possible.
In my opinion: Most 'health insurance' is a waste (Score:2)
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Agree wholeheartedly. Layer a high-deductible policy on top of that (true "health insurance" for big, unexpected problems rather than the make-my-office-visits-and-pills-a-bit-cheaper system we have today), and the vast majority of people would be set.
if there were no insurance industry (Score:2)
You can look at the LASIK clinics for an example of a medical industry which is mostly unaffected by insurance, since it is generally considered an elective procedure. The price is mostly quoted up front, and you can shop around for a better price, or go for a more reputable doctor. From what I can tell, price is also much lower than most procedures covered by insurance. Of course, if you can't afford LASIK, then you simply don't get it done, so there is a much smaller coercive price driver.
Actually, on sec
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FYI, the article didn't talk about "starving to death..."
Read this article [nationalgeographic.com].
It will perhaps educate you.
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On a gold-gray morning in Mitchell County, Iowa, Christina Dreier sends her son, Keagan, to school without breakfast. He is three years old, barrel-chested, and stubborn, and usually refuses to eat the free meal he qualifies for at preschool. Faced with a dwindling pantry, Dreier has decided to try some tough love: If she sends Keagan to school hungry, maybe he’ll eat the free breakfast, which will leave more food at home for lunch.
Dreier knows her gambit might backfire, and it does. Keagan ignores th
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The van might be paid off (either because it's just that old or from better times when money was more plentiful) whereas getting a new (or even used) car would come with car payments that they couldn't afford.
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The poorest Americans are richer than the average of the rest of the world. They have access to actual healthcare where in other places, they don't even have access, as there are no doctors. We live in a world of riches, and think we're poor, because the myopia we suffer. The solution being offered, "single payer" isn't really a solution, and will end up putting us on the road to Venezuela and Greece.
The real fix is to get rid of insurance all together, and rid ourselves of the middlemen extracting 50% of a
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I'd argue that the solution is for people to have fewer kids, but that's somewhat off-topic.
Yes, we do need of get rid of the insurance companies. If you accept that government is going to be involved in our healthcare, then there's no logical reason for insurance companies. I'm no fan of big government, but insurance companies are simply leaches on the system.
And to pile onto your ER example, I have my own anecdotes. Last March, I had a severe fall that nearly sliced my nose off of my face when it hit t
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So we get rid of insurance but single-payer is a no go...the way to pay for medical care is then âoebe richâ? If you donâ(TM)t want to suffer from chronic conditions with expensive treatment then simply donâ(TM)t be not rich?
Even if you take all of the insurance industry padding out of medical bills they are still not cheap. The bottom four quintiles of the population wouldnâ(TM)t be able to afford more than occasional clinic visits. Treatment of chronic conditions would only end up
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It's true: poor Americans don't normally starve. But they do frequently die of exposure or lack of medical care. The indigent mostly get care from emergency rooms, and don't have treatment for more chronic issues.
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Do you run Linux or Windows on that computer? Do you buy using Amazon? Those are free will choices that made those guys rich.