US health system ranks last compared with peer nations, report finds

Several times I've had to wait for months on healthcare in the US system. This is such a weak argument against a socialized system.

Our politicians and pundits say it all the time.

You're wrong but not in the way you think. It's also a joke to everyone inside the US, except billionaires. Billionaires love it

They always bring up Canadians having to wait for long periods of time at the emergency room.

Get everyone to use the ERs and clinics which pay doctors less. Think there's a reason for that?

Avg hospital CEO earns $649,198 to $1,093,977 in my state of NC.

That's who the system is working for. Additionally, all it's share holders.

When I was in the insurance industry, for a company who administered various policies from Aetna, BCBS, Cigna, United and Medicare, that was the SOP. Deny anything that took more than a few seconds of brain power, put clients through endless rounds of appeals. The medical director was amoral AF too, because well, the insurance company exists for profit, and bonuses are dependent on paying out as little as possible. It got pretty bad, too, enough that my immediate supervisor started signing off a bunch of approvals, circumventing the medical director, where any shred of plausibility was available.

Now, there is automated software. HIPAA has it's pros and cons.

Oh, I read this John Grisham book.

I'm not a lawyer, but a piece of legal advice I've seen repeated many times is "Never threaten to sue. Just sue."

As soon as you threaten to sue, you'll never be able to talk to anybody except the legal team, and they'll do nothing to help your case.

I'm sorry you're having to deal with this. This is an issue that's deeply personal to me.

When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, she was severely preeclamptic going into the third trimester. She ended up having to stay in the hospital for five weeks with her blood pressure being constantly monitored and nurses ready to pump her full of medications anytime it went too high. It was so severe that when she was being discharged a doctor told us that there was a good chance she would have died had she been admitted to another hospital less equipped to deal with it.

Our insurance tried to stick us with a bill that was hundreds of thousands of dollars, saying that the whole thing "medically unnecessary." Thankfully we had an amazing patient advocate that handled all of that for us and I heard from her later that my wife's OBGYN (who is an amazing, kind hearted, and soft spoken man) had called up the insurance and absolutely ripped them a new one.

Private insurance is a parasite on society. The goals of a private medical insurance company are at odds with providing good care to people and they leach resources better spent elsewhere.

For those wondering, wife and baby thankfully ended up happy and healthy in the end.

Sorry for the rant, this kind of shit gets me absolutely inflamed.

I meant moving to another country permanently, not traveling, but good to know that the US system can reach out and punish me if I have the audacity to travel out of network. :(

You had to go to Canada for that? I had that same experience right here in the states.

Well, almost. It cost me $1500, and that was after my insurance paid down the majority of the bill.

I disagree, when they prevent a system that benefit all including themselves, they are actively acting like sadists who want to see the suffering of those who cannot afford to pay.

That's how I see it, and half the population wants that.

A capitalistic system will maximize for one thing and one thing only: Profit.

If anything else improves, such as service, cost, or wait times, it will only by as a byproduct of increasing profit. If there are easier, faster, or cheaper ways of increasing profit (such as cutting staff and having customers patients wait longer) then those will be done instead. The FDA exists because otherwise capitalistic companies will put customers health and lives in danger because it is more profitable to do so and pay out potential lawsuits than it is to make sure safety regulations are in place in the first place.

The only way to maximize something other the profit, such as customer service, is through regulation. That is why monopolies are illegal: if a customer doesn't have a choice you can charge them as much as you want, and take as long as you want, and perform as poorly as you want, and they still have to use your service because they have no other choice. When a customer patient needs to go to the hospital they don't have the luxury of "shopping around", they have a medical emergency and need help now. So without regulation a profit motivated hospital can charge whatever they want, especially considering nobody discusses prices before doing life saving operations.

"lack of market freedom" is not the reason 1 Tylenol pill at a hospital costs you $15.
"Excessive regulation" is not the reason patients are charged $40 for crying.
"Lack of competition" is not the reason asking for an itemized bill will save you money. “It’s estimated that about 60 percent of medical bills that are issued have errors” (I can't think of any other industry that would consider that acceptable.)

What specific regulations would you remove from hospitals, and how would the absence of those regulations directly help customers patients?

The US is last place in the linked article while having the most profit driven hospital system of the countries compared. Making it even more profit driven is not going to improve the thing customers patients need improved.

Not really true about Netherlands:

The Netherlands has a dual-level system. All primary and curative care (i.e. the family doctor service and hospitals and clinics) is financed from private mandatory insurance. Long term care for the elderly, the dying, the long term mentally ill etc. is covered by social insurance funded from earmarked taxation under the provisions of the Algemene Wet Bijzondere Ziektekosten, which came into effect in 1968. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands#:~:text=Health insurance in the Netherlands,long-term nursing and care.

See the social insurance aspect? The largest financial burden to the Healthcare system is usually a person's last 5 years of life, so they've socialized the expensive parts of healthcare and privatized the cheaper stuff.

For Switzerland:

The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person's income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.[8]

This isn't something done in every US state, to be clear. In some states it's very hard to access healthcare if you can't afford the premium. This lack of coverage often creates a heavier burden on healthcare systems because people are uninsured.

When we find the military and give weapons to countries like Israel and many others across the world, it raises the stock prices of military contractors and congress gets more personal wealth.

A public option for healthcare would lower stock prices for health care companies and insurance companies which congress is also heavily invested in.

You think firearm deaths indicate a poor healthcare system?

I waited less in American hospitals than in Canadian hospitals for care