Slice, Scope, Snip, Stitch

"But do those people have a point too? Well some of them do, in a way, because right now Medicare is a somewhat inefficient and staggeringly expensive system that could use some serious restructuring."

Perhaps it is this way as a result, not as a corollary, to privatisation. You don't think Big Pharma wants to weaken our medicare? Anyways good story.

Well I read it!
I hate surgeries, I have had 2 and I remember clearly those masked faced people lookinh over me, knowing they were going to slice me up and wondering if I would ever wake up.

"Perhaps it is this way as a result, not as a corollary, to privatisation. You don't think Big Pharma wants to weaken our medicare? Anyways good story."

Yeah, I agree. I guess I didn't make it clear that I'm very pro-Medicare. It makes me sick how in the US, the anti-public healthcare groups do everything they can to ensure that as much funding as possible gets cut from public hospitals, and then they point to those same brutally underfunded shells of facilities as evidence that public healthcare doesn't work. I believe very strongly in public healthcare, I just think that our system needs serious work.

Medicare is the mess that it is precisely because privatization isn't allowed. It was doomed to failure from the start. Any system based on the premise that everyone must be forced to pay in a little and then be entitled to get a lot, even everything, as required would be so doomed. The result is as you see it: a system with too much demand and nowhere enough supply, incredibly inefficient, unable to provide service at all much of the time, abused by many, expensive to run, with lots of resources eaten up by the overhead of administration.

The belief that it's possible to provide anything resembling good, even adequate, service under this system is a myth; a myth that's been mindlessly believed for decades; one that many people refuse to discard, despite all the evidence against it that's available.

One thing that most people need more often and more urgently than medical care is food. Where are the cries that private food service providers--privately-owned farms, grocery stores, supermarkets, restaurants, food carts--are "bloodsucking" types who want to make money off people's need to eat food to live? Where are the calls to ban all private food-provision services and instead have food provision run entirely as a public service? A system where everyone is forced to pay-in a little each month, but would then be entitled to visit any food-provision facility and get as much food as they needed. Or could get from the system. Food providers would be required to give out food as required, then fill out forms and do other bureaucracy to get the cost of their food provision back from the government. You'd get the equivalent of the Medicare disaster is what you'd get: long waiting lines, minimum pay-out, and people dying from not getting food soon enough.

The best thing that could happen to Medicare, and everyone under it, is for it to collapse entirely, so that some other system can be built instead. So long as the structure remains up, no matter how crumbling it is, no matter how much its foundation is sand, there will be those who'll close their eyes and ears to how bad it is and who'll refuse to even allow an alternative to exist alongside it. Medicare is religious faith; any opposition to it is called heresy and competing religions are outlawed.

I agree with partial privatization of Medicare in a sense, because in theory it would vastly reduce strain on the public system. In an ideal situation, the public hospitals would continue to receive a reasonable amount of funding and the people who could afford to would get themselves taken care of at private clinics, leaving public beds open to people who need them. The problem comes at tax time when the people who have been paying for care at the private clinics decide that they don’t want to cough up tax dollars for the public hospitals that they barely use. People already bitch up a storm about paying taxes to support the programs that they do use. It’s no secret that the government is more inclined to listen to the people with the money (ie. those who are actually capable of generating lobby power and would be a real hassle to have working against them) and anyone who earnestly believes otherwise doesn’t have a clue. The result? More funding cuts to the public hospitals, resulting in poorer service, thereby prompting another move to private care by people who are financially in the public/private grey area, who will then decide that their tax dollars should not go to the dismal hospitals that they just ran away from. Repeat cycle ad nauseam. The politicians have promised over and over that this won’t happen. Do you believe them? You’re dreaming. And conveniently, you don’t even have to resort to imagination to see this scenario in vivid live action. Just walk into a public hospital in inner-city Detroit (or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington DC, or San Francisco, or Philadelphia….).

And the best thing that could happen to Medicare, and everyone under it, is not a total collapse. The best thing would be if the general public somehow achieved a basic understanding of their own health and were willing to take care of themselves. Our hospitals are jammed to the tits with patients who have knowingly smoked themselves to lung cancer and emphysema, eaten and couch-potatoed their way to bowel cancer and adult-onset diabetes… I don’t need to go on. The common North American reaction to health problems is not to fix the root of the problem, but to treat the symptoms, much like the attempts to fix our crumbling health care system by throwing money at it. “Oh, you’ve got hypertension from eating a terrible diet and getting no exercise? Well don’t bother changing your lifestyle, that’s such a hassle. We’ve got a drug that’ll alleviate your symptoms, and if it doesn’t work… well that’s what the hospital is for! Seriously, don’t worry about it, take these pills and go back to your McDonalds Super Size Combo. Besides, you pay your taxes so you damn well deserve something in return right?� So like almost all major issues, this is another one that can largely be traced back to education. But education-boosting programs have not exactly been on high priority with our politicians. Why? Because they work from the ground up and won’t generally show benefits until years after the government who extended the help is out of power. That and because just maybe… the wealthy people who can afford to send their kids to private school don’t see why they should have to spend tax dollars for someone else’s kids to go to school. For one piece of evidence of the effectiveness of education on public health, just compare the rate of HIV infection in North America, where millions of dollars have been spent on education and public-awareness campaigns, to the rate of infection in South Africa, where the government flatly refused to acknowledge the existence of HIV.

Whew. Well I’m out of gas… and all I meant to do was tell a story about my knee.

Anyone who thinks that opening privet clinics and hospitals will take the "stress" off the public system is mistaken. One of the major reasons our health care system is in such bad shape is not because it is public or privet but because there is a extreme shortage of doctors. If privet clinics were set up, many doctors would leave the public system to set up there own practice. This would leave the public system with even less doctors and even longer wait lists.

The problem we are in now should not be a surprise to anyone. When a government starts cutting back the training of doctors to save a few bucks, 10 years down the road you'll see the result and that is what we are in now.

If we are to talk about the cost of health care, Canada in 2002 spent $2931 per capita providing every signal Canadian with health care. America with a privet system paid $5274 per capita and over 43 million Americans have no health care coverage.

If Canada opened its doors to privatization we would not follow some utopian European model. All that would happen is that American HMO’s would come over the border set up privet hospitals and sue our government under Chapter 12 of NAFTA for equal funding and bankrupt our health care system.

Anyone who defends privatization in Canada has not done their research.

Jeff

Wow, two Jeffs? What a world.

I hadn't even though of that "NAFTA Chapter 12 Factor". What a total nightmare.

I just want to point out that, although you all think Medicare is in a mess, it's in a far better state than UK's national health system (NHS). I very much doubt you'd have had your knee sorted out that quickly here. I get crippling sinus headaches and so far it's been 9 months since I first saw my doctor, and I still haven't had the results of the CT scan, which didn't happen until last month, so I don't even know what's wrong, let alone the cure.

And even so, I think a public health system has to be the way forward, because I believe that everyone has an equal right to health care, whether they can afford it or not.

Thanks for the UK perspective Ruth. I hope you can get things sorted out soon. Public healthcare is an expensive project, but I consider it to be well worth the cost. I should also make clear that I was impressed by the treatment I received over the last four months. I've heard many stories of others waiting much longer for similar surgeries. What threw me was that I got two opposite diagnoses and didn't know what to mentally prepare myself for. As it turned out, the knee specialist at UBC was right and I couldn't be happier.

Hello Jeff,
If you have time on Sunday I will be teaching a class at 11 again same time same place...hope to see you there.I'm glad to hear that your knee was feeling better after the yoga.
Are there any recent recovery changes?
Aly

hahaha sorry about the triple message..don't know what happened there.