- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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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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.
Yup and that entire scheme is meant to make people drop out and not get the surgery they need.