<p>It is true that now instead of 2 years to become a respiratory therapist, it is encouraged that RTs get a 4-year RT/BS degree. I believe their salaries have also gone up.</p>
<p>A LOT of healthcare dollars are spent in the last 1-6 months of elderly patients lives, including surgeries, cancer treatments on 80-90 year olds. Sorry, I am not providing the statistics or charts.</p>
<p>One thing people do not calculate in healthcare discussions about insurance is the huge medical costs that ARE being incurred by the US as a society because so many of the un/underinsured ARE getting medical care in the emergency rooms and hospitals because they cannot be denied care. The hospitals try (or not to collect) and ultimately have to take the loss & make it part of their operational expenses, passing it on to everyone else or getting government subsidizes to keep their doors open. Several of our hospitals in our state have been in bankruptcy for this reason. </p>
<p>It’s not that people with no insurance don’t get any care, they generally don’t get the less expensive and more effective PREVENTATIVE CARE (including immunizations) and get the much more expensive and less effective ER care for crises.</p>
<p>There is no reason we couldn’t have single payer universal health insurance and invest the savings in medical research or the many other needs of our country. The research is NOT being primarily funded by medical insurers anyway.</p>
<p>These are not by any stretch the sole sources of research innovation, just two quick-to-find sources that I had in my head. </p>
<p>Contrary to your American-centric viewpoint (not your fault but when you live in the US you really seldom hear about anything else), lots of countries are contributing hugely to the collective advancement of healthcare research and innovations.</p>
<p>If they have a smart phone like I commented, their phone is costing a lot more than $30/month. </p>
<p>And yes lifestyle choices are big to me. If an individual chooses to have a lifestyle that conflicts with their ability to have healthcare, then why should I be giving away healthcare? If it’s not important to them, then why am I expected to make it a priority of mine for them?</p>
<p>We can lead a horse to water, but if they don’t drink it isn’t my fault.</p>
<p>We do great things in healthcare; I fully believe that. I’m not happy with our insurance system because frankly it has a lot of flaws. If you’ve read my posts before, you’d know that I can be quite critical of it. But the experiences that I’ve read about, heard about, and been told by people I know really make me prefer our system.</p>
<p>$40 a month for my smart phone. My last medical bill was around $2k not covered by insurance. Assuming I dropped the smart phone, my plan would go down to about $20. So that would be… About 8 years to get that $2k back from dropping the smart phone. Oh, but I’d also lose work that way(not having quick access to email).</p>
<p>Oh and of that $2k, here’s the kicker. Half was for the ambulance ride. $1k for an ambulance ride two small cities away. Not covered by insurance because they didn’t feel it was necessary. The doctors did, since I had just passed out, but obviously the insurance company knows best!</p>
<p>Or the “medical directors” who are paid to deny claims are NOT experts in the fields in which they are making decisions and choices. It is a huge savings for insurers to deny or delay paying claims while they wait for patients or providers to give up waiting for payment or keep providing more & more docs justifying it. The delays in payment are legend around here and most places I have read of.</p>
[quote]
While we still talk about “the” Internet, we increasingly have two separate access marketplaces: high-speed wired and second-class wireless. High-speed access is a superhighway for those who can afford it, while racial minorities and poorer and rural Americans must make do with a bike path. … Millions are still offline completely, while others can afford only connections over their phone lines or via wireless smartphones. They can thus expect even lower-quality health services, career opportunities, education and entertainment options than they already receive. True, Americans of all stripes are adopting smartphones at breakneck speeds; in just over four years the number has jumped from about 10 percent to about 35 percent; among Hispanics and African-Americans, it’s roughly 44 percent. Most of the time, smartphone owners also have wired access at home: the Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that 59 percent of American adults with incomes above $75,000 had a smartphone, and a 2010 study by the Federal Communications Commission found that more than 90 percent of people at that income level had wired high-speed Internet access at home.</p>
<p>But that is not true for lower-income and minority Americans. According to numbers released last month by the Department of Commerce, a mere 4 out of every 10 households with annual household incomes below $25,000 in 2010 reported having wired Internet access at home, compared with the vast majority — 93 percent — of households with incomes exceeding $100,000. Only slightly more than half of all African-American and Hispanic households (55 percent and 57 percent, respectively) have wired Internet access at home, compared with 72 percent of whites.</p>
<p>These numbers are likely to grow even starker as the 30 percent of Americans without any kind of Internet access come online. When they do, particularly if the next several years deliver subpar growth in personal income, they will probably go for the only option that is at all within their reach: wireless smartphones. A wired high-speed Internet plan might cost $100 a month; a smartphone plan might cost half that, often with a free or heavily discounted phone thrown in.</p>
<p>The problem is that smartphone access is not a substitute for wired. The vast majority of jobs require online applications, but it is hard to type up a r</p>
<p>I agree with sewhappy that a big part of the increase in medical costs is simply that we have more and better medical care options than we used to. My FIL had a heart attack 20 years ago and survived because paramedics came swiftly and transported him to a hospital where he underwent immediate open heart surgery. 20 years earlier he simply would have died. I have a CPAP machine - a therapy that was invented just 30 years ago. And look at all of the drugs that have come on line in the past 20 years. All that stuff costs money. But that’s not the only reason our health costs are so high.</p>
<p>Everything HIMom said was also true. The elderly are kept alive for an extra six months or year at tremendous cost. I’ve heard old people beg to be allowed to die. I’ve seen elderly relatives badgered into undergoing expensive, intrusive, unpleasant medical treatment even knowing they would die within the year in any event. Our medical treatment rationing system is simply irrational for the elderly. There are doctors, hospitals, medical and drug supply companies making billions, not by making the last months of the lives of the elderly more pleasant, but by subjecting them to inappropriate and ultimately pointless (and fabulously expensive) treatment.</p>
<p>And yes, we do have universal health care. We just deliver it the most inefficient way possible, by having people wait until they are really, really sick or injured then taking them to the County Hospital Emergency Room.</p>
<p>Finally:
I’m not going to argue with you over whether this is accurate or not. I have no doubt that it is, at least in some cases. Just as it always has been, and always will be. The reason you should “make it a priority” is because there will always be people who make bad choices, and a system which ignores that fact will not perform well. E.g.: our current health care system. If that fat, chain smoking, Big Mac eating failure has a kid with a burst appendix, that kid is going to be treated for it, whether it’s a priority of yours or not. A society which plans its functioning without taking into consideration the predictable bad choices of a significant number of its members is doomed to failure.</p>
<p>My kid teaches for a living, grosses $31K/year. Is still on our insurance as she’s just turning 25. Small private school, which cannot afford anything except castestrophic medical care insurance, which will go into effect in January… So she will have NO coverage for her medications, doctor’s visits, etc. She has polycystic ovary syndrome, an inactive thyroid, asthma, sleep apnea and a blood disorder, and needs to have an ankle surgically repaired. No insurance company will accept her on an indivdual policy because of her health history. In other words, if she cannot find a different teaching position and give up the job she got this fall and loves, her after-tax income will be less than her annual medical expenses. Her meds alone are $7K a year without insurance.</p>
<p>None of her health issues can be blamed on her behavior or diet (she’s one of the 20% of sleep apnea patients who are not overweight). Should she just curl up and die to save all you tax payers a couple of bucks?</p>
<p>My husband just had to go on disability due to a heart problem. I earn just over $30K a year working fulltime, and health insurance through my employer would cost $19K a year to cover hubby, myself and younger daughter.</p>
<p>sewhappy, I replied to this earlier, that the huge number of uninsured right now is the reason. But I wanted to add to that.</p>
<p>This actually is not a new issue; it’s been erupting periodically since the 1950s. That’s when other countries were deciding to link health insurance to citizenship, and we alone decided to link it to employment. The problem was obvious from the beginning – what about people who weren’t employed? Or people whose employers weren’t so generous? And the question will continue to arise as long as we have the current system, where the lucky and the wealthy have access to good care, and the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves.</p>
<p>No lifestyle choice in the world is going to cover $1300/mth if you are earning minimum wage…and let me guess, you probably don’t believe in that either. Are you really this out of touch with the reality of so many american’s lives? </p>
<p>If you are so worried about paying for ‘others’…why don’t you fight against public school education, fire departments, police, and court systems? You know, make it all ‘user pay’ so YOU aren’t paying for THOSE people’s choices.</p>
<p>Did you go to university yourself? Public perhaps? Did your family pay the full cost of your education?</p>
You mean cutting out my smart phone isn’t going to miraculously pay my medical bills (which wouldn’t exist in almost every other developed country)? I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!</p>
<p>Honestly, if it weren’t for the new ban on denying people with pre-existing conditions, I had seriously considered moving to another country post-graduation. I’ve seen both of my parents fight with insurance companies for the last decade and I know that’s where I’m headed given my conditions (which could be easily managed, but I simply can’t afford the meds sometimes). My mother (who grew up in Europe on “socialized medicine”) fully supported that decision and will perhaps end up there anyway.</p>
<p>It’s too bad we weren’t even talking about the same thing. It’s just too bad. </p>
<p>Because what I was talking about would be payable with cutting your cellphone bill… And I’ll bet in those other countries you wouldn’t have a cellphone anyway because that money would have gone to taxes to pay for that healthcare!</p>
<p>When you offer universal healthcare with no other changes, you’re not offering free public school education - you’re offering free to a doctoral level at a $60K/year school, and probably to everyone south of the Canadian border, and that’ll bust any bank. </p>
<p>The problem in the US is not that there isn’t enough money in healthcare for its citizens - the taxpayer and policy holder is already paying well above market rates. The problem is how the money is used. If anything, some money needs to be removed from the healthcare bucket to bring it in balance with the rest of the world.</p>
<p>I was at a national conference recently where a caregiver talked with tears in her eyes about her dad’s last month in the hospital that cost $250,000 where she and he were begging to have him released to hospice with his extremely severe emphysema. It took the entire month of her fighting to get him released to hospice! He was finally released and allowed the few hours there before he died. It is and was so wrong!</p>
<p>Talk with any nurse, pharmacist, radiology tech, respiratory tech or the like and they will tell you the problem with health care delivery is the proliferation of hospital and health administrators. The average person would be astounded if they knew who was actually hiring and determining staffing levels. If you think insurance administrators salaries are ridiculously high, youll be equally shocked at the salaries of the mid and upper level hospital/health administrators.</p>