Let's care about folks who can pay
May. 22nd, 2019 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mprotsenkoI had a discussion recently about different types of healthcare system. Heard a very honest argument along those lines (not verbatim so I may misinterpret it but I do hope I summarize in the right way):
- Yep, the poor are screwed, but what about those who can pay? Shouldn't we care about them too? Does it make sense to prioritize that care? If we start caring about poor, others will suffer and that's bad.
Well, a couple of months ago I took part in a fundraiser. People were collecting money for a software developer (a friend of a friend of mine). Why? After all, if you work in Facebook, you get the best health insurance money can buy. If you work in Facebook - you are not poor, you belong to top 1-5% incomewise. He must have done something really wrong to screw things up so bad he needs to beg. It must be a poor decision. It will never happen to us. Right?
Well, wrong. Turns out - if you have a cancer, if you're too sick to work, you lose your job. After a certain period of time, your disability insurance stops paying - since you're "healthy" enough to be doing something (even if this something is paying 10x-20x less than your last job). You still need to make your mortgage payments (your kids need to go to a good school, right?), but you also need to travel out-of-state to a clinic that specialized in your type of cancer (and pay out-of-network copays and deductibles). And you need to rent another place to stay during your treatment. Ah, and in addition to that you need to make insurance premium payments (fortunately, due to CORBA you get to keep your insurance - but you still need to cough up several thousands dollars a month).
So if you think that a single payer system only benefits poor people - think again. When you are going to become sick (not if, when - it is a matter of time for all of us) - it is going to become about you, not about poor people. (Unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars stashed away.)
The only lucky break here is that you can be old enough to qualify for an existing single payer health coverage (Medicare, yep).
- Yep, the poor are screwed, but what about those who can pay? Shouldn't we care about them too? Does it make sense to prioritize that care? If we start caring about poor, others will suffer and that's bad.
Well, a couple of months ago I took part in a fundraiser. People were collecting money for a software developer (a friend of a friend of mine). Why? After all, if you work in Facebook, you get the best health insurance money can buy. If you work in Facebook - you are not poor, you belong to top 1-5% incomewise. He must have done something really wrong to screw things up so bad he needs to beg. It must be a poor decision. It will never happen to us. Right?
Well, wrong. Turns out - if you have a cancer, if you're too sick to work, you lose your job. After a certain period of time, your disability insurance stops paying - since you're "healthy" enough to be doing something (even if this something is paying 10x-20x less than your last job). You still need to make your mortgage payments (your kids need to go to a good school, right?), but you also need to travel out-of-state to a clinic that specialized in your type of cancer (and pay out-of-network copays and deductibles). And you need to rent another place to stay during your treatment. Ah, and in addition to that you need to make insurance premium payments (fortunately, due to CORBA you get to keep your insurance - but you still need to cough up several thousands dollars a month).
So if you think that a single payer system only benefits poor people - think again. When you are going to become sick (not if, when - it is a matter of time for all of us) - it is going to become about you, not about poor people. (Unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars stashed away.)
The only lucky break here is that you can be old enough to qualify for an existing single payer health coverage (Medicare, yep).
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-28 06:56 am (UTC)Longer waiting times for non-critical care don't make people happy - but are there any numbers to show that they worsen the medical outcomes? I have a very fresh example of the contrary - I just got my knee scanned. The waiting time was about 7-10 days. They found some inflammation and a minor ligament tear - which I lived with for ~20 years. If the waiting time would be about a year - there would be literally no change in the outcome (and they could have spent time and money on diagnosing/treating people who actually needed care, not on some grumpy guy with a moderately injured knee).
Can you please prove it? You made only one verifiable claim - about 50% of personal vehicles being trucks.
Let's look it up.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36674
As far as I see, trucks make up about 16% of total cars sales, that's not even close to 50%. And we see that cars and crossovers - which are much more fuel-efficient that SUVs - make up the majority of sales.
So I don't know where you got your data from - but it is not confirmed neither by other data nor by personal observation (really? more than 50%? try counting cars next time you stuck in traffic and you will see that "more than 50% of vehicles are trucks" - well, how do I put that mildly? - is not even remotely true). The only way to get to 50% is to lump up trucks and SUVs into one category and then count the market share by dollars, not by cars sold or owned.
But that would be a dirty trick and I cannot imagine you stooping that low. It seems like someone fed you the false data.
So pardon my lack of trust, but I have no reason to accept the rest of your statements on that matter ("poor people make poor spending choices instead of spending money on healthcare/education") without any proof. At least not until you bring the data. (And by data I mean full distribution chart, not just the average number - since top 1% can skew up average numbers pretty bad).
The same argument could have been made by Marie Antoinette. Indeed, the system worked really well not just for her but for a lot of other people as well. Until it didn't. But you right - it was hard to change it even then.