<p>Healthcare in Britain is breaking the country. They are going to be cutting to the point that 20 % of hospitals are going to close. Socialized medicine is not the answer. Changes need to be made in end of life care and people need to lose weight, exercise and stop smoking. </p>
<p>My doctor tells me that he feels like a broken record saying this over and over, but the patients fail to make the life changes needed to improve their own health and then complain about how much healthcare costs.</p>
<p>But your doctor has a point. Our medical system is “disease care.” Other countries focus on prevention and education, which is one reason their costs are far lower.</p>
<p>Prevention and education? Really, is there anyone in the United States who hasn’t heard that smokers are at higher risk of lung cancer and other diseases. Is there anyone who doesn’t know that being obese is bad for their health? </p>
<p>There needs to be some financial incentive to lead healthier lives which isn’t part of the system now. </p>
<p>The article I read today about Britain said that the government was going to cut back on what it spent on health care. Already people beg for water and food in their hospitals. People wait for months for surgeries and other procedures. Not the path the U. S. should take.</p>
<p>I can’t help again noticing the difference in costs…</p>
<p>"People on low incomes or who are unemployed are also exempt from the charges, so no one goes bankrupt paying medical bills.</p>
<p>Across Europe,<em>health</em>budgets are coming under pressure from the new age of austerity.</p>
<p>In Spain, the Catalan government introduced a 10 percent budget cut earlier this year, which meant closing or reducing the opening times of 100 outpatient centers. Increased<em>health</em>charges in Italy are now being passed along to patients, who must pay an extra 10 euros ($13) for a medical consultation and another 25 euros ($33) for non-emergency hospital treatment. French officials are cutting some reimbursements for*healthservices and raising taxes on cigarettes and soda to bring in more revenue.</p>
<p>According to the OECD, Britain spends about $3,487 per person on*health. That’s far less than the U.S., which spends $7,960, and Norway, which spends $5,352, making it the country that spends the most in Europe."</p>
<p><em>what</em> would be payable Hopscout? Are you talking about co-pays? Or the monthly insurance premiums for someone not as fortunate as you to have healthy care insurance through their employer? I thought the main point of this thread was about healthcare costs. </p>
<p>I live in Canada. And i assure you, people are not opting not to get an iphone because they spent their money on taxes or have to worry about a medical bill. In fact, taxes are non-existent at the lowest level of income, and a small percentage of income until you move up into much higher income brackets, such as mine. See here in Canada, we try to even things out so everyone can live quite well and everyone can have healthcare. Sure it might mean that we do not have as many billionaires because of the tax rate they pay, but we are okay without them. </p>
<p>I speak as someone in the top 1%, who happily pays about 35% of my total income to taxes. Why am I happy? Because no one- including my kids, my parents, my less fortunate neighors- has to worry about their health. Because we don’t have a chunk of the population declaring bankruptcy every year because of medical expenses their insurer would not pick up. Moreover, few have to worry about their university education, and perhaps most important, we don’t lock our doors when we are at home. We aren’t hiding behind community gates or carry guns because ‘other’ might engage in violence.</p>
<p>dstark, you really are a great provider of links.</p>
<p>My recommendation would be a tiered system that will raise the ire of everyone and bring joy to any politician who’s up against an incumbent:</p>
<p>Emergency only for those without papers. </p>
<p>A low tier similar to the European (say Italian) model for all legals, including Medicaid and Medicare-basic with restrictions, progressively more emphasis on keeping someone comfortable rather than trying to cure for the elderly all with an emphasis of making premium payments be in synch with expenditures.</p>
<p>Cookie points and penalties for personal healthcare/abuse.</p>
<p>An option to buy higher levels of insurance that’ll get you prompter service, a bigger formulary, wider range of procedures & implants, and easier access to specialists.</p>
<p>Established standards of treatment that if followed, even if there are adverse reactions, the provider will be protected from lawsuits.</p>
<p>More bundling of services than pay for procedure.</p>
<p>I’m sure the docs would love this one - an ill-informed bureaucrat telling him how to practice medicine - put restrictions especially in physician owned diagnostic and surgi facilities on what they’ll get paid for.</p>
<p>Keep the really expensive treatments only for research or those who pay through their nose for rolls-royce plans.</p>
<p>Overall this will probably cover more people at a lower cost, but it’s guaranteed to make even more people mad than we have right now.</p>
<p>The problem is that if we accept this reality, the large scale escalation of services and costs will occur pretty much automatically as the increasing number of baby boomers need more medical care as they reach the socialized insurance age, and additional expensive procedures become available to be covered under the current socialized insurance scheme. And don’t underestimate the power of the AARP – remember the recent addition of Medicare Part D without any funding provision as an attempt to please them (and no one complaining about deficits and debts today seems to be proposing to repeal it).</p>
<p>Actually, in many poor countries, people are bypassing land lines and going directly to mobile phones, whose infrastructure is less expensive to set up, while allowing for more efficient economic decisions (e.g. a fishing boat entering mobile phone range of shore can call the fish markets at various ports to find out where there is a shortage and best price of the fish it is bringing, instead of guessing which one to go to).</p>
<p>Of course, mobile phone service is less expensive in a lot of countries, though that appears to be most strongly correlated to population density (some place like Hong Kong needs a relatively small number of mobile phone towers for its population, so you can buy prepaid SIMs whose calls to local and selected international targets including the US and Canada cost the equivalent of US$0.03 per minute, but mobile phone service is expensive in sparsely populated Canada).</p>
<p>In the US, some people may find that mobile phone service is less expensive than land line service, but it depends on the use pattern.</p>
<p>For whatever it matters, there are increasing #s of households who are eliminating landline phones and opting to just have cell phones. The young adults often do this, from when they are in HS & college. My niece & her husband have no landline in their new home; my friend has one but mainly relies upon her cell phone to speak with anyone. My kids have not had a landline connected since they were in HS (even when one came with their housing throughout college, they never bothered to find out what the phone number was or plug in a phone).</p>
<p>Many homeless and poor have only cell phones with varying often pre-paid plans, according to the researchers I have spoken with. It is very hard to get their opinions in surveys and studies that are based on telephones, as many of the public health surveys are. Many also do not have a reliable way of getting mail, as they may be couch-surfing, switching addresses, sometimes living in shelters and/or on the street.</p>
<p>It is difficult for people to communicate with healthcare providers when they do not have good ways of being contacted by phone, computer or mail. I have been to a clinic that had patients fill out their address & contact & any insurance info AT EVERY VISIT because so many changed their address & other info so frequently.</p>
<p>I’m fairly certain that cell phone ownership is more common in Europe–and cheaper-- than it is here. According to stats I found, the US is #72 on the list of cell phones per capita.</p>
<p>TatinG, you seem to be one of the many Americans who think that Canada and the UK are the only countries we can look to for models of health care distribution. Why is this, I often wonder? Is it because they are English-speaking? The fact is that EVERY other industrialized country provides universal coverage, and even Britan’s much-despised National Health system far out performs the US in public health outcomes.</p>
<p>Because prepaid plans are often marketed to poor people, they are often low cost, and non-poor people with non-heavy use patterns may find them a better deal, especially with the absence of a two year lock-in that is common with postpaid plans.</p>
<p>Poor often also have cell phones because they have no idea how long they will be able to live at any particular address. With a cell phone, at least they can have contact with SOMEONE in theory. Pre-paid plans are much less preferred by most cell companies, because they don’t bring in nearly as much money or profit as postpaid plans.</p>
<p>I have a friend whose daughter was in Italy studying and contracted hepatitis. My friend had to beg and plead just to get a simple blood test for her daughter. And then when the doctor came, he didn’t have even the most basic of supplies, alcohol to swab the area and a cotton ball. So he used toilet paper and perfume. The student is now back in the US where she can be properly treated. </p>
<p>I had another acquaintance who broke a leg while skiing in Canada. The wait in the ER was 18 hours. </p>
<p>A woman in Canada expecting multiples, I forget how many, had to deliver the children in Montana because Alberta did not have sufficient neonatal beds. </p>
<p>No one goes to Canada, Britain, except to the private hospitals, or Italy etc for cutting edge medicine, new treatments, or fast treatment.</p>
<p>*
I have a friend whose daughter was in Italy studying and contracted hepatitis. My friend had to beg and plead just to get a simple blood test for her daughter.*</p>
<p>This doesn’t make sense. How would you know you had hepatitis * without* a blood test?</p>
<p>We can trade anecdotes all day. I met a woman who was a vet student from France. She tried to get care for a broken leg here in the US but was told that nothing much could be done she had to just wait for time to heal it. She went back to France where the worked with her & rehabbed her so she could come back to her vet internship in the US in 1/2 the time it was supposed to take for her to heal. She thought the US healthcare was MUCH worse that what she got in France–her words, not mine. We have tons of people getting medications outside the US because it’s so much cheaper.</p>
<p>That is the point. You do not know for sure what you are dealing with without blood test, yet they were reluctant to do it. And did not have basic supplies. Sounds like third world medicine in Italy.</p>