How socialized medicine actually works

[laklak]

My two cents, FWIW, having lived under NHS, the U.S. system, South African system, and places with no fucking system at all. And being married to an occupational therapist who has worked in both the UK and the US. The NHS does really, really well on some things, not so well on others. On the plus side, many issues, from the common cold to breaking a leg, are handled quickly, efficiently, and cheaply. Other things, like a referrals to a specialist, not so much. I realize many here have had experiences at odds with that statement. The U.S. does some things very well, if you can afford it. By "afford it" I mean you have health insurance, which about 80-85% of the population has and has had since before the "Affordable" Care Act. The U.S. system works very well in many cases - I look at the care my parents received under Medicare, for example, or Mrs. Lak, who fell (while drunk as a fucking Lordess) and broke her wrist. Very fast, very efficient, and cheap (after insurance). OTOH my sister in law in Liverpool is waiting 18 months for a referral to a pediatric psychiatrist. So there are pluses and minuses on both sides. Another thing the UK does really well is after care - therapy and the like. Mrs. Lak eventually quit working in the U.S. system because she was so constrained, by the insurance companies, in her reatment options. So it's not as simple as "socialism good, capitalism bad". In any system there are trade-offs and constraints.

[MrJonno]

In the NHS you may have to wait for some treatment but it won't make any difference to the outcome (as results show). It's not nice to wait a few weeks to see a cancer specialist but its not going to have any affect on your survival rate but then again worrying about how you are going to pay for it must be every bit as stressful as the cancer as well.

Isn't Medicare basically the NHS for old people in the US and to be honest if I was forced to choose between paying taxes for healthcare for the elderly or heatlhcare for the young it would be old people you are on your own (you have had plenty of time to save and almost certainly have a lot more capital than the rest of us). I suspect Medicare is more to do with democracy than it is to do with capitalism/socialism ie there a lot of old people who vote

[Hermit]

it's not as simple as "socialism good, capitalism bad". In any system there are trade-offs and constraints.

This is where mixed political setups come in. Australia's national health care system is very good indeed, but nowhere near perfect, for example, but you are always free to avail yourself to the medical service sector that operates (<--no pun intended) if the tax payer funded system comes up short. In effect, you don't pay more than a nominal fee for anything that is not already provided via public funding, except on the few occasions when your needs are not covered in the time you desire or at all. Curiously enough, dental work is not part of the national health scheme except for very basic stuff to low income earners, but most plastic surgery is understandably not part of it either. For many of those things increasing numbers of customers go to practitioners in Asia.

[mistermack]

People like Seth like to bang on about Cuba, but ignore the sanctions that Cuba has had to endure for the last god-knows-how-many years, both by the US, and all of the other countries that the US has managed to bully.

While I don't support the Castro communist system, you can hardly pretend that all of Cuba's woes are down to that, when you place an embargo on everything they produce.

Unless you're fucking hypocrite.

[laklak]

Isn't Medicare basically the NHS for old people in the US and to be honest if I was forced to choose between paying taxes for healthcare for the elderly or heatlhcare for the young it would be old people you are on your own (you have had plenty of time to save and almost certainly have a lot more capital than the rest of us). I suspect Medicare is more to do with democracy than it is to do with capitalism/socialism ie there a lot of old people who vote

Sort of, it's not free for everyone. You must work and pay taxes for a certain period, currently 10 years, in order to qualify for "full" Medicare. Basically it's a "free" 80% policy, you're still liable for the copay, though there's no deductible. If you work less there's a sliding scale, if you never worked you pay the ful tarriff, which is about $435 a month. Most people buy a supplemental policy that covers the remaining 20%. It's actually more complex than that, with different sub-programs covering prescription drugs and long term care, but that's the gist of it.

In about 3 years I'll be eligible, and my insurance costs will be around $100 a month for the supplemental and free for the Medicare.

[Seth]

Works just fine in Oz...

(a public health system with universal health cover in partnership with a robust private health system)

No it doesn't, you just think it does because you're not paying for it and there's OPM left for the government to loot. When the OPM runs out because other people are sick and tired of being dunned for your medical bills and they quit producing wealth, or flee the country, the public health system (which factually isn't that great to begin with, what with all the care rationing and denials people in Oz suffer through) will collapse, as it must in any socialist system.

Oh fuck off, Seth. You know nothing about how systems in other countries work, and it's none of your fucking business anyway...

No, you fuck off, and it is my fucking business because you fuckers keep trying to export your fucking socialized medicine to my country which fucks me economically, so fuck all socialist swine.

Economic facts are economic facts and there's no such thing as a free lunch and every socialized medicine system on earth is bleeding the nation dry of OPM because it must do so as a matter of economic fact. No nation can possibly serve all of the medical needs of everyone "for free." It's NEVER free, ever. Somebody always has to pay for it, or had that simple fact escaped you?

[Seth]

We have had universal healthcare for more than 70 years and it hasn't happened yet. Actually our government is more likely to block medical staff from coming into the country, not prevent them leaving.

Actually, your new doctors are about to go on strike in the UK because of working conditions and wage complaints, or had you missed that bit of local news?

As of today, the strike is off. I guess you're a bit behind on the news over there.

And I didn't say your government did bar doctors from leaving, I speculated that it soon will do so as UK doctors flee the country for places where they aren't treated like slaves and can make decent money.

Well, you know, if it hasn't happened after 70 years, there's a fair chance it never will.

Hardly. It's as inevitable as entropy that it will fail because there's no such thing as a free lunch and doctors in the UK are ALREADY fleeing the country because they don't want to work for blue-collar wages in your state-run hospitals. It's just a matter of time before the NHS system collapses entirely because all the senior doctors have left for greener pastures, all the new doctors refuse to endure the parsimony of the state, and all the nurses leave patients to die of thirst after drinking the water in their flower vases because, well, why should they work...they're going to get paid anyway.

And then the UK will do the same thing Cuba is doing. It will seize the passports of new doctors and forbid them from leaving the country on the premise that they owe their labor to the state to pay for their medical education.

[Seth]

We have had universal healthcare for more than 70 years and it hasn't happened yet. Actually our government is more likely to block medical staff from coming into the country, not prevent them leaving.

Actually, your new doctors are about to go on strike in the UK because of working conditions and wage complaints, or had you missed that bit of local news?

As of today, the strike is off. I guess you're a bit behind on the news over there.

Off, on, off again, on again. It's just a symptom of the disease that's killing the UK: Socialism

The OPM is running out you see, and pretty soon the NHS will simply collapse and your "socialized medicine" will look a lot like the hospitals in Cuba, where you can't get a sticking plaster or an aspirin.

[Seth]

In the NHS you may have to wait for some treatment but it won't make any difference to the outcome (as results show). It's not nice to wait a few weeks to see a cancer specialist but its not going to have any affect on your survival rate

Of course not, because you're fucking going to DIE of cancer before the NHS gets around to treating it. It's happened before and will happen again, and more often as the money runs out.

Isn't Medicare basically the NHS for old people in the US

Yes, it is, and it's a fucking travesty of medical care just like all socialized medicine is. You get delay, denied, rationed and inferior medical care under Medicare precisely because no nation can provide top-quality, unlimited medical care to everyone without going bankrupt, and the first people to be thrown under the bus are the elderly, precisely because they are the sickest component of the population and consume the bulk of the socialized medical care, so the impetus is to find ways to delay or deny care in hopes that they will die before the government has to pay anything. It's just like the NHS in that respect.

and to be honest if I was forced to choose between paying taxes for healthcare for the elderly or heatlhcare for the young it would be old people you are on your own (you have had plenty of time to save and almost certainly have a lot more capital than the rest of us).

And there it is, the very justification used by EVERY socialized health care system on earth to let old people die by denying them their "free" socialized medical care. So, you see, socialized medicine can't even hold up its end of the Marxist/Socialist bargain: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

No, it's "From each according to what some government bureaucrat decides is due, to practically nobody in parsimonious portion so the Marxist elite can party and drink." That's Socialism in a nutshell.

And what that means is that all Socialists are simply selfish pricks who contribute as little as they can possibly get away with and take as much as they can possibly get and fuck everybody else.

[Seth]

People like Seth like to bang on about Cuba, but ignore the sanctions that Cuba has had to endure for the last god-knows-how-many years, both by the US, and all of the other countries that the US has managed to bully.

That's because it's a fucking murderous communist dictatorship that damned near caused the destruction of civilization on earth by allowing Soviet nuclear weapons to be placed on its soil 90 miles from the US.

While I don't support the Castro communist system, you can hardly pretend that all of Cuba's woes are down to that, when you place an embargo on everything they produce.

All they have to do is give up communism and hang Castro from a light pole. Pretty simple really...if they had guns, which they don't because guess what, Castro seized all of the guns owned by civilians immediately after the revolution.

Unless you're fucking hypocrite.

The lesson of Cuba is that when the OPM runs out, the Socialist system fails. Cuba is a fine example of that inevitable economic fact because it has not been allowed to rob capital from anyone and because nobody in Cuba has any capital...except Castro and his minions of course, who have seized all the available capital under the Marxist dialectic and "distributed" it to everyone "fairly," which means everyone in Cuba gets a whole dollar and nobody has enough to build a factory, which is exactly what happens eventually in every Socialist country on earth.

Cuba cannot make its communist system function without an influx of capital from capitalists outside of Cuba. That is the fundamental flaw of Marxism you see. It takes money to make money and in Cuba nobody has any money because Castro has already taken all the capital and spent it on military adventurism to expand Marxism and now it's impossible to create a company that makes money, which provides jobs, which creates demand, which causes capital to flow for investment, which creates companies, which provides jobs, which creates demand, which causes capital to flow for investment, which creates companies, which provides jobs, which creates demand, which causes capital to flow for investment.

That's the nature of economics. Without capital (money owned by someone that is available for investment with the expectation of a return on that investment) nothing is created except grinding poverty and oppression, which is the very definition of Cuba.

Socialism is just baby communism waiting to grow up into full-grown Communism, as per Marx's statements to that effect, which means that Cuba, an end-state Communist regime, is the perfect and typical example of exactly how both Socialism and Communism actually work in real life...they don't work at all, ever.

Socialism is exactly like the winding-down of entropy resulting in the heat-death of the universe. It can do nothing other than fail eventually. How long it takes depends entirely on how much OPM (capital) there is to rob from the populace or from the available capital held by other nations. Denying socialism access to capital as has happened in Cuba doesn't change the end result, it just speeds the process, which is exactly what the US has been trying to do for fifty years...cause the Castro Communist regime to collapse and cede power to the people so they can establish self-rule by democratic means. Unfortunately, other communist states like Russia have been propping up Cuba for decades, which slows the process of destroying the Communist state in Cuba and does nothing but cause generational poverty and misery for the Cuban people.

Somebody needs to JDAM the Castro brothers and their minions and put an end to Cuba's misery. Unfortunately for Cubans, Obama is "normalizing" relations with Cuba (because he is a Marxist himself) which will do nothing but perpetuate the existence of the brutal, murderous Castro regime even longer.

[Jason]

No, you fuck off, and it is my fucking business because you fuckers keep trying to export your fucking socialized medicine to my country which fucks me economically, so fuck all socialist swine.

Come now Seth, we both know you want to ride my Neo-Marxist monologuing until you see Lenin. You dirty little Schweineficker you.

[JimC]

Seth wrote:

...you fuckers keep trying to export your fucking socialized medicine to my country...

No we don't, we're perfectly happy to let you stew in your own right-wing bile...

[Seth]

Seth wrote:

...you fuckers keep trying to export your fucking socialized medicine to my country...

No we don't, we're perfectly happy to let you stew in your own right-wing bile...

Which explains the attempt in Colorado to put socialized medicine into the Colorado Constitution by ballot measure how, exactly.

If it weren't for all the other socialist fucks agitating for it everywhere it wouldn't be happening.

You want to live as a proletarian slave, I'm fine with that, but keep your fucking mouth shut and dig potatoes.

[JimC]

Seth wrote:

...you fuckers keep trying to export your fucking socialized medicine to my country...

No we don't, we're perfectly happy to let you stew in your own right-wing bile...

Which explains the attempt in Colorado to put socialized medicine into the Colorado Constitution by ballot measure how, exactly.

If it weren't for all the other socialist fucks agitating for it everywhere it wouldn't be happening.

You want to live as a proletarian slave, I'm fine with that, but keep your fucking mouth shut and dig potatoes.

What the fuck does something happening in Colorado have to do with me in Oz?

I don't give a shit about it, quite frankly. We will do what we want to do as a country, so will you...

[Seth]

Seth wrote:

...you fuckers keep trying to export your fucking socialized medicine to my country...

No we don't, we're perfectly happy to let you stew in your own right-wing bile...

Which explains the attempt in Colorado to put socialized medicine into the Colorado Constitution by ballot measure how, exactly.

If it weren't for all the other socialist fucks agitating for it everywhere it wouldn't be happening.

You want to live as a proletarian slave, I'm fine with that, but keep your fucking mouth shut and dig potatoes.

What the fuck does something happening in Colorado have to do with me in Oz?

I don't give a shit about it, quite frankly. We will do what we want to do as a country, so will you...

You keep touting your system as being so wonderful (when it ain't) as a justification for other nations to impose it and you criticize the US for not having socialized medicine, that's what it has to do with it.

Socialism anywhere supports Socialism everywhere, so any Socialism is too much Socialism.