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So what have the septics got against health care for all?

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R1Geezer | 11:37 Mon 07th Sep 2009 | News
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Just watched "Sicko" ok , I know Michael Moore tends to cherry pick facts to suit his views but even so I thought that the content did seem indicative of US health care in practice. Like the guy whose firm was employed solely to find a reason to reject a claim on the tiniest technicality. Of course he covers the health service in Britain, Canada and France and makes a big thing of taking Some 911 firemen to Cuba for treatment. As far as I can tell the main omissions are the waiting times for operations etc but hey, I normally can't stand the bloke but found his portayal of US medical care as shocking in it's callousness and sheer indifferent brutality, you can't pay you go untreated. So what are the US afraid of? isn't it basic civilised behaviour we are talking about? Yes NHS costs are high and need looking at for efficiency etc but I take comfort in the fact that if you get injured/ill you get treated regardless. It seems that all but the very rich (medicare accepted) have to take their chances with the insurance companies as to whether they will be treated even if they have insurance, 50 million do not! Your thoughts please!
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They probably look at the great pinko brigade in our NHS penpushing and costing a fortune.

Yes the NHS is loosing 170K, it needs to loose more. We cannot afford thousands of lazy pen pushers. And yes they are lazy many of them.

The concept of free medical care for all is correct, the UK implementation is disastrous. Remember we have a post code lottery too.

And lets not forget it is not free. Most of us pay a fortune.

They probably also dont want to be a World Health Service which is what we seem to have bencome.
Gold Gromit Badge to Geezer for being a closet pinko.
So What Have The Septics Got Against Health Care For All?

For the umpteenth time...as a country, we cannot afford it.
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I love the idea that we cannot afford it as a nation clubbing together but that somehow if hospitals were privatised and having to cover treatment and turn a healthy profit it would somehow be cheaper.

America spends more of it's GDP on healthcare than any other country and still they can only provide a decent service for the well off.

We *cannot* afford not to have it!

As for managers it's very easy when you don't see what they do - Everyone know what a surgeon does but not an NHS manager.

So when there not enough staff on duty on a particular day, supplies have run out, nobody's managing the contracts with the 3rd parties like cleaners and cooks, making sure maintenance gets done, making sure ambulances are serviced and kept on the roads etc. etc. etc.

In short when YMG and Zac have sacked all the managers and the infrastructure falls apart what will they say then?

Well they'll probably say "I told you the NHS was a waste of time"
jake...you do go on......NOBODY is suggesting that the NHS be privatised.

No other country has copied the NHS and the US certainly won't.

No political party is going to threaten the NHS.

So what is your problem?
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Canada, France and Cuba seem to have a pretty close reemblance to the NHS, sqad!

The Yanks can easiy afford it it's just that they fear it will lead to Communism.
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thanks Gromit, you'll find my views are quite left wing in certain areas!
RiGeever Cuba Health Service is far superior to the NHS and has been for two decades.

Canadian doctors went on strike when it was suggested that Canada should have UK.NHS health service and it was ditched.

France.....I don't know enough about them.
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I was going by the film the three examples given of free at the point of use health services were France, Cuba and the UK. No boubt there are others and no doubt there are subtle differences but the main point is that they are paid for by taxes.
Geezer.....I have got you point, but quality of care surely comes into it, as it may be free (which it isn't) but if the quality of care is sometimes crap, then an overhaul and reassessment is needed.

And that is exactly what the NHS needs...............REASSESSMENT.
Not according to the WHO squad

The NHS comes in at 18 and Cuba at 39 - the US at 37

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO's_ranking_of_health_care_systems

Where do you get your data from?
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OK sorry

I still want to know if Squad has any actual data showing the Cuban Health service as better than the NHS

Or whether he's just basing his opinions on hearsay
Except, that France only pays about 75 per cent of the patient's bill it's true that the system there is paid by taxes. The rest is paid by private insurance, which cannot be refused to anyone. The rates are near enough the same across France, varying primarily according to your age and where you live..The Dutch have an interesting variation. It's illegal not to have health insurance there but the government has made directions to the insurers whereby a basic healthcare package must be provided at the same set, low, cost, agreed by the government, and nobody can be refused the insurance.

The problem in the US is not that 47 million don't have insurance but that 250 million do, and they can't see why they should pay for anyone else (which is how the argument is really being framed, but dressed up with nonsense about 'socialism' and 'death panels' deciding whether anyone deserves to live or not) The insured are mostly satisfied with their insurance, largely, I suspect, because they rarely make any claim which is queried or refused and so don't see the nasty side of it.

The Moore film gives a pretty good picture of French healthcare (which far surpasses the NHS in speed and other benefits).
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perhaps sqad, but that's another discussion, what do you think of the US system as it is?
Sqad, Canada has a system which is near enough identical to the NHS in practice. Moore has a short section on Canada, in his film. The doctors did employ strikes to stop it coming in but they didn't succeed. The system is so close to the NHS that Canadians complain about delays and waiting ! They have one big problem we haven't. That's the sheer size of the country, with great tracts which are thinly populated. They have a resulting shortage of doctors, or the doctors are very far away from the patients, in some areas.
jake....I looked at your WHO link, but couldn't see what you were comparing..? cost ? waiting times....please tell me.

A damning league table shows that Britain is 16th out of 19 countries surveyed. Patients in some European countries are 15 per cent more likely to be alive five years after diagnosis.
The figures come from the hugely respected Eurocare-4 study, which compared the five-year survival rates of 2.7million adult patients up to 2004.

This is for cancer survival rates.....let me know what you are comparing.
R1GEEZER...
If I were a middle-income American living in Seattle or Chicago, I could almost certainly rely on superior care than if I lived in Birmingham or Newcastle.
But whatever the failings and excesses of the American system, the statistics suggest that it delivers better outcomes than the NHS when dealing with serious illnesses. I say 'suggest' because we should always be wary of comparing figures compiled in different ways in different countries.

In treating almost every cancer, America apparently does better than Britain, sometimes appreciably so. According to a study in Lancet Oncology last year, 91.9 per cent of American men with prostate cancer were still alive after five years, compared with only 51.1per cent in Britain.
The same publication suggests that 90.1 per cent of women in the U.S. diagnosed with breast cancer between 2000 and 2002 survived for at least five years, as against 77.8 per cent in Britain.
So it goes on. Overall the outcome for cancer patients is better in America than in this country. So, too, it is for victims of heart attacks, though the difference is less marked.
If you are suspicious of comparative statistics, consult any American who has encountered the NHS. Often they cannot believe what has happened to them - the squalor, and looming threat of MRSA; the long waiting lists, and especially the official target that patients in 'accident and emergency' should be expected to wait for no more than four - four! - hours; the sense exuded by some medical staff that they are doing you a favour by taking down your personal details.

Most Americans, let's face it, are used to much higher standards of healthcare than we enjoy, even after the doubling of the NHS budget under New Labour. Of course, the U.S. is a somewhat richer country, but I doubt its superior health service can be mainly attributed to this advantage.
An increasing number of us take out private health in

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