OT-Health Care Issue

I wish the thread on the Canadian system hadn't drifted astray. I was really hoping to hear from some Canadians on this issue. I don't have the visceral dislike of socialized medicine that some have demonstrated but then again, I've never experienced it. In reading the comments on the tax costs of a socialized system I started thinking about what I'm actually paying now. My insurance (HealthNet HMO) runs about $12,000 per year for my wife and me. This is medical and does not include dental. Anyhow, I wonder how this compares to what a Canadian or a British citizen pays in taxes. jor

Reply to
jor
Loading thread data ...

jor wrote in news:2007100607223116807-jor@jorcom:

"...I've never experienced it". Say no more.

My personal dislike comes from having personally experienced it since it was socialized in the '70s.

Dental in Canada is not part of the socialized medicine system. It is 100% private and free.

It is also virtually impossible to buy private insurance for it, so unless you get company insurance, you pay out-of-pocket.

The American system is 50% socialized. It is crippled by tort, the tax code, insurance regulations and the Medicare/Medicaid funding model.

Your insurance system, though ostensibly private, is crushingly regulated and is almost entirely a creature of the state. Socializing your system the rest of the way would be disastrous.

"Costs" are easy to hide in the general tax bill, which is just what Canada does. I suspect nobody really knows how much Canada spends on health care.

Reply to
Tegger

Thanks for your post. I wonder if any other Canadians feel differently. Re your remark on the U.S. system being 50% socialized, I would agree when talking about Medicare/Medicaid but the deduction threshold for any tax break on medical expenditures if very high and few are able to claim it. I don't know. I'm personally OK with my own insurance for now but I'm also aware that a lot of people simply cannot come up with the money to buy their own. There just has to be a better way. jor

Reply to
jor

As i look back, medical costs started to rise by leaps and bounds when medical insurance, medicad/medicare came into being and grew. I remember my father paid for all medical bill out of his pocketbook. There was no insurance (except for extreme situations), at all, we were not rich either, rather on the poor side living in a small town with a country doctor who made house calls. Hospital was 30 miles away. We got by somehow. Then something happened, medical insurance came along a prices went through the roof. Oh, insurance will cover it.......

Reply to
dbu`

If you are in contact with any Canadians ask how much the important staples in life, for Canadians, are. Such as gasoline, beer, cigarettes etc. You might be surprised. Also diesel fuel. Ron

Reply to
ronbon

Yeah, once again I have to agree with dbu. In my view, a couple of things have created the huge and outrageous cost picture of modern medicine. 1. doctors have to perform every test in the book just to cover their behinds in case of liability, so they order expensive tests which have little if any relation to the problem at hand, and

  1. the patient (or 'customer' ) could care less what tests and procedures are involved, because a third party is paying for it, and he's only on the hook for a small co-payment of a few bucks. I remember well when I went thru two courses of periodontal treatment which ended up saving my teeth for probably an additional two or three weeks...it was 00 per course, and I paid zero, so of course I went along for the ride. It was (again, in my view) totally useless and just a lot of discomfort with no gain, but it was gratis. On the other hand, I've also had treatment for a slight peel of one corner of a cornea, by laser surgery, which would have cost 00 if done by a private ophthalmologist, but only cost me a co-pay of ten bucks. I also take Vytorin for cholesterol, which would cost at retail for 100 tablets almost 0, and that Rx costs at my HMO. I really have to pity the working man or woman who's self-employed, and who thus has to pay in the hundreds of dollars a month for coverage...that is, if they don't have a pre-existing condition for which they can't even get insurance coverage. The health care crisis in the US just HAS TO be addressed, and soon.
Reply to
mack

"Extreme situation" insurance from reputable companies is getting harder to find. It began long ago:

formatting link

(I expect a visit from Garvin with some comments on this...)

Reply to
JoeSpareBedroom

Well, yea, like who buys private plans nowdays. If you are very wealthy you insure yourself. If you are like most of us you have a group plan of some sort. If you are unemployed you got a problem, however some states do have health insurance variants to help out those who fall through the cracks. I think that is ok. I don't want the federal government involved, because as you know a reasonable federal plan to begin with can easily morph into one humongous unmanageable son-of-a-bitch with attacks on personal freedoms and privacy.

No thanks to Federal run health plans, no thank you.

Reply to
dbu`

jor wrote in news:2007100609073575249-jor@jorcom:

Then you're a patsy.

No kidding.

There just has to be a

There is a better way: prohibit the government from having anything whatever to do with health care or insurance regulation. Sort of like it was prior to 1965, before all these problems started.

Why is your insurance so expensive? See below.

TORT (liability)

---------------- Class action; contingency-fee lawyering; bottom-of-the-barrel jury selection; massive, wildly outlandish punitives, even in cases (like Vioxx) where the jury foreman admitted he had NO idea what the defense was saying.

These all conspire to create massive risk for medical suppliers and their insurance companies. Who wants to be the next Johns Manville or Dow Corning?

INDUSTRY INSURANCE

------------------ Out-of-control tort means massive insurance hikes for industry, since the insurance companies' exposure is far more than it was 40 years ago. The hit is not just on direct malpractice insurance as bought by obstetricians and anesthetists, but on the makers and suppliers of equipment and pharmaceuticals. It's accumulative, one added on top of the other by the time the cost hits the final payer (often an insurance company, ironically).

CONSUMER INSURANCE

------------------ Many states have anti-discriminatory regulations that prevent insurance companies from performing the traditional actuarial assessments that were standard for over 200 years. This means they cannot charge according to perceived risk levels, so EVERYBODY's insurance goes up to compensate. This way they get around governmental and activist charges of "discrimination".

Some states even have "must issue" laws. These dictate that if somebody applies to them for insurance, the company MUST issue a policy at some price. This has a tendency to make people avoid buying insurance until they actually need it, so the insurance company ends up being sucker- punched.

Further, states tend to have rules that dictate that if insurance companies wish to offer one kind of insurance in that state, that company must offer ALL its product lines. Withdraw one (such as flood or health), and they are barred from selling ANYTHING. So what happens to rates? They go up, of course.

TAX CODE

-------- Just after WWII, the government retained wartime price controls for a few years. This meant that companies, desperately needing labor to meet demand, could not attract that labor by offering better wages than the competition.

They COULD offer better benefits, however, so they did. This caused a distortion where insurance became a business expense for the companies, them paying for it with pre-tax dollars. But if /you/ bought insurance privately, you paid for it with after-tax dollars. This is a situation that still exists.

It wasn't so bad until rates began climbing for the reasons given above, but it's a real problem now. A large chunk of the "40 million Americans without insurance" are between jobs.

MEDICARE/MEDICAID FUNDING MODEL

------------------------------- Private insurance originally paid only for standard job billing. If hospitals or other medical providers wanted to make capital improvements to their infrastructure (buy new machines, put a new wing on the building, etc.), they had to do it like any other company, and save up for it, or take out debt at a financial institution.

Many medical providers were initially leery of the government's new idea for Medicare/Medicaid, as they were afraid they might become civil servants, unable to do anything outside what the governmental strings allowed. The government's answer? Permit providers to add capital costs to their billings to Medicare/aid.

Well guess what happened? The astronomical bills they began receiving from providers immediately caused big budgetary problems for the Johnson presidency. Johnson solved that by simply debasing the currency, which led directly to the ravaging inflation of the '70s.

I think they've since toned down what they're willing to pay, but the inflationary effects remain.

Reply to
Tegger

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.