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My father, discovered he had blockage in 4 of the five artries in his heart at age 81. The very next day, he had by-pass surgery in St Joseph's hospital in Towson, MD. The procedure was almost entirely covered by his insurance. He did have to pay a few hundred dollars. My father was not a rich man, he died a few years ago at age 90. My mother age 92 is still with us, and is receiving outstanding medical care in the US.
My source for the 12-18 month wait time for by-pass surgery came from a 48 year old gentleman waiting for a by-pass in Toronto. He told me he was scheduled for his by-pass in 12 months, and had been scheduled for 2, for a total wait time of 14 months. He also told me the wait time was pretty normal. This was in 2002, when I lived in Toronto. Hopefully this has improved under Stephan Harper.
As you know, the system in Canada is not a health care system, but a wellness system. It works great unless you get sick.
The system is turning into a two tier system. The "have's" will be able to see a physcian, the "have nots" are relegated to the clinics. Stop in a clinic some time and you will witness all the "new" Canadians waiting for medical care, never to see the same physican twice, if they are lucky enought to see a physican, and not a physicans assistant. It's really sad.
In the US, anyone with or without insurance can have a perscription filled at Walmart. Cost is $4.00 for a 30 day supply or $10.00 for a 90 day supply. There are limitations to this program, the medicine must be available in generic form. (a great deal are, and most only pay $4.00 or $10.00). I haven't heard of seniors receiving "free" prescriptions in Canada, so I don't know if that is so. I don't know of any program in Canada to rival the one at Walmart (Costco has one as similar program). I don't believe Walmart-Canada or Costco-Canada offer these programs.
Another point, the example offered on the show by Sally, whose uncle had to spend his retirement savings for care in the US. What would be the better choice? Spend the money in the US and live, or not spend the money in Canada and die. Colon cancer untreated is always fatal.
Finally, read this article about Canada's health care from the Globe and Mail. First paragraph is: "For the first time in Canada, patients with chronic conditions – such as diabetes, high bloodpressure or heart failure – will soon be able to do one-stop shopping for all their medical needs." 16 million Canadians suffer from chronic conditions. This new clinic, the only one in all of Canada, opens on July 19, 2011. It is expected to see 75 patients a week. Here is the link to the complete article. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/health-news/patients-with-chronic-conditions-get-one-stop-care/article2070306/
All women are screwed one way or another.
Mary,
Just looked it up;
http://www.waittimes.net/Surgerydi/en/PublicMain.aspx?View=0&Type=0
Shows 9 out of ten bypass surgeries within 44 days. Perfect? No, but my point was still the better system. No way I would choose the US system. Where did your 18 month figure come from? There will always be extremes.
Cheers,
Rick
Hi Mary,
Not saying you are engaging in disception (sic), but I stand by my description of my own and my parents' experience.
Wait time for a heart bypass? Can't say for sure. When my mother was in distress, she was operated on immediately. My dad was 77 and there was no question of an age limit. Where did you get those numbers? I realize we now have Sun / Fox news Canada..
Myself, I have a doctor (Ontario) and was referred to and seen by a cardiologist within a week or two last year. Not everyone has a GP but there are some accepting patients all the time. I have seen that first hand
Main question; How would you have it? Would we be better with the US system? Is there any reason we wouldn't end up paying just as much without the guarantees we have now? Is our system perfect? Of course not. It does provide the necessary services and yes it might not always be as fast as you might like, but compared to the US or UK systems, I think it is a reasonable balance.
I honestly believe that my parents would have lost their house and savings if we had been under the american system. When I need to see a doctor, routine or emergency, it is my health that is on my mind, not my ability to pay or take on debt.
You are of course free to take out private insurance for dental and prescriptions. Seniors do get drugs essentially free as i understand.
Don't call me dishonest because you disagree or have been given other information. A dialog can allow us to be better informed.
Rick
You are correct in assuming that my knowledge of pink slime is limited. Perhaps it just sounds bad to me and therefore I choose not to go near it. More importantly, since it is ok to eat by your assessment, how much to you consume on a weekly basis? Also, is there a reason that you know of as to why the youtube link you posted has been blocked from comments?
Thank you for showing your scientific expertise on the matter!
Well Rick,
I found Sally's experience with Health Insurance BC similar to my own. In which Provience do you live? In Ontario, the waiting period for a heart by-pass is between 12 to 18 months, plus if you're 75 or older, you will not have it. Doctors in Ontario are not accepting new patients. If you don't have a doctor, you're forced to go to a clinic. Many of the folks I worked with went to Buffalo when they needed immediate attention, for MRI's, e-rays, etc. There is no assistance with perscription drugs, nor is dental covered, unless the patient has supplemental insurance through there employer. You are being less then honest. If you want to engage in a dialog, respond to my post. If you want to continue your disception, ignore it. The choice is yours.
Excellent point!
Even if it gets out of committee and passes the House, it'll never get past the Senate.
Comparing health insurance to car insurance is a bit silly, but I'll play.
First, not all men pay more, its based on age--and young women do pay more than older women, for the same reasons--younger people have more accidents/tickets, its just boys have more than girls.
But if we use your premise that this is not discrimination, but based on actuarial tables, women do, on average, use medical care more often as preventive care, the cheapest form of medicine whereas men usually only go to the doctor when there's been an ongoing problem...which leads to more expensive care and more money that the insurance has to pay out...so, using your premise that boys pay more because of serious complications, men should pay more for health care because of the serious complications that not going to the doctor on a regular basis!
Happy Canadian here.
Sally the Canadian is about as honest as Joe the plumber.
My parents were not well off.. paid down a house over 30 years.. each was at times in hospital for extended periods of time; very good treatment, immediate when required and yes, a few month's wait for something like a hip replacement.. The key is, through all this, when they would have certainly been dropped or otherwise screwed by an insurance company, they never had the threat of losing their house or savings.
How much is that peace of mind worth? How much healthier are we without the stress of wondering if our coverage might be used up or otherwise lost?
No, if there was real dissatisfaction we would hear of it constantly. Our provincial governments brag at election time about reducing wait times.. even Conservative governments. It just plain works and costs us less too.
Rick
No mention of the Rally For Reason (www.reasonrally.com). It happens in DC on Saturday.
Limnophiliously ugly = Pond-lovingly ugly. Um, okay.
On the other hand....if it is assumed that women have more medical problems than men....can we also not assume that men are usually the cause of those problems? And, if the "actuarial tables" are so sexist maybe they are racist as well. Maybe they are elitist? Do they show that rich people live longer than poor...and so the rich should pay less for healthcare? Do they not go by zip code perhaps revealing whether you live in a well-to-do location...or, a low-rent high crime area? Maybe they collect information on what we likely imbibe or what we eat...using information on our credit cards or supermarket discount cards.
Yes, I'm sure these actuarial tables go on a lot of data to pin-point who is a good risk and who is a bad. Insurance companies are profit driven rackets that will coldly soak you for all your money and try their darnedest not to have to give out any. They use all the psychological tricks through marketing to make you feel very insecure and overly worried about sickness and death. They will make you believe that they are an indispensable necessity while they milk you dry and then try to find any trick or lie to keep from having to pay when the time comes ("pre-existing conditions").
They have special departments assigned to the task of finding out little bits of arcane information about you that they can use as an excuse to use as a "pre-existing condition" so that they can renege on having to "cover" your major illness.
And, with social networking, they can find out an awful lot about you as you, or your friends just happen to mention the time when...... Or, what information on ills and cures you search for on the internet. They are amassing all this information on you to be used to wiggle out of their part of the coverage.
What about covert collection of DNA from prior blood samples...perhaps collected without your knowledge? They could, perhaps, get a good idea of what genetic misfortunes you are likely to have inherited. Unlike inheriting a lot of money from wealthy parents, the blue-bloods and silver-spoon in the mouth types may have inherited traits that would look very, very bad to an actuarial table. Of course, you may have plenty of money and wouldn't care...unless, for some reason, one day, you lost all of your money and had to just scrape by. Then you too would not be able to afford the insurance premiums.
We need government to regulate, and keep everyone safe from these gangland empires.... not act as their bully-boy, strong-arm payment enforcers.
Women are not usually the ones to start wars against other nations. And the major waste of our tax dollars have been on the stupid illegal wars and trying to force our will on other peoples, stealing their raw materials...all done by stupid and greedy men. How many thousands..or hundreds of thousands of men come back from these wars with major physical or psychological problems that all have to be dealt with by our tax dollars?
It's time for our government to grab these greedy bastard insurance companies, and Banksters, and Wall Street Ponzi Schemers, and the MIC by their throats and squeeze till we return to sanity. We need universal single-payer health care like every other civilized first-world countries. We need to stop invading other countries. Most of these ills are done by men. But I doubt if those actuarial tables contain any of these facts. They just target the weak and the meek.
Well, women can very easily grab us by the balls and do some squeezing. And you don't mess with women scorned, ticked off, and mobilized. The Greek Play Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, was a fun lesson of what could be done.
Watch Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap if you want to see one of the major reason's Brittan's medical care is messed up. Has a lot to do with the government implementing quotas for bureaucrats and the bureaucrats finding cleaver ways of meeting those numbers by falsifying or re-classifying the data.
N
I was taught that the (small-L) libertarian principle is that you have the right to do what you want unless it interferes with someone else's more basic rights. Our society was based on that, but not constitutionally. That also doesn't prevent the government from acting in the public interest, because providing something doesn't interfere with others' rights (something modern libertarians don't seem to understand).
On top of this, I apply what I call the liberal principle: When you have the power to help, you have the moral duty to help. And since the government has that power, it has that duty.
Would increase the sales of electric cars too... maybe to the point where production will have to increase here in America to keep up with imports. Hope the Republicans have taken in account the law of unintended consequences. They keep going back to the same well never expecting it to run dry.
N
Do men pay more for car insurance? Is that gender descrimination? I think it's more about actuarial tables and less about gender descrimination.
A sudden rise in oil prices would have serious consequences. As a prince from Saudi Arabia said last year, they want to keep the prices at somewhere between $2.50 and $3.00 per gallon so that America doesn't actually develop alternative energies.
So what happens if we start a war with Iran and it raises the price of gas, and Obama is forced to actually enact alternative energy development by public sentiment?
Obama should either start the war with Iran ASAP so he can get actual alternative energy development started by summer, or he better hope he can at least hold it off until the end of October. Kind of cynical I know, but I wouldn't be surprised if the current administration hasn't considered it.
On the other side of it, Obama can just grow a backbone, and do everything he can to start pushing alternative green energy now so he can both ween America off fossil fuels and provide a slue of jobs. Its the only sensible and humanitarian thing he can do... not holding my breath for it though.
N
Sometimes when societies (as with individuals) hit rock bottom, instead of coming together they tear themselves apart. I'm not so certain the American society is poised to come together in a peaceful and evolutionary movement if it bottoms out. So many have been spoon fed the dictums of me first, us against them, government is bad big government is worse etc, etc... I think there is a better then 50% chance of violent actions by the common man... which plays well into the hands of those who wish to enact and enforce even more limits to civil liberties to the point where the existence of them will be a farce.
As the song goes... "You say you want a revolution well you know we all want to change the world, you say that is evolution well you know.... but when you talk about destruction don't you know you can count me out"
Revolutions almost never end up well, and generally end up with a different elite in charge and bleaker social conditions. I wouldn't bet on the success of one.
N
why is it that the GOTP gives all of the breaks to the top 1% and puts all of the liability on the rest of us?
I don't know about others but I don't think the post office will have anything to worry about now thanks to the NSA. Would you want the NSA reading your love letters, private thoughts to friends, or your dissent well don't email it send it the private federally protected old fashion way by putting it in an envelope and mailing it.
Peace, love, and granola
I'm certainly against the discrimination against women for any reason...especially health care, or health care costs. And I would love to see healthcare for all AT AN AFFORDABLE PRICE FOR ALL.
Unfortunately, the way this Obamacare is set up, in collusion with the healthScare insurance companies, we could very well be discriminated against, not on the basis of sex, but on the basis of any claims we make against the insurance companies for medical care. They can raise their prices, if we have health or medical problems, as much as they can get away with.
I don't see our government regulating healthscare prices in the future. Now, if Obamacare had at least a government option (but single payer is the ideal) to give us a way to seek shelter from the rapacious healthscare monopolies, then Obamacare might be something other than a radicalized strong-arm payment enforcer to the healthscare insurance criminals. But, as usual, we just cannot rely on Obama to be anything but the effete, flip-flopping chicken and political butt-buddy of the rich and powerful....the ruling elite...Wall Street...big business...insurance scamsters.
And, I understand, Obama has now flip-flopped on the XL Keystone pipeline. He just keeps giving in to the Republicans. The ruling elite couldn't have it much better than this. The people, still having a modicum of hope based on their fictitious savior, Obama, is kept in-line and placidly numb.
By the way...interesting headline!!
Yes, I knew I had misspelled that word but forgot to change it. Thanks for noticing, though. Didn't think anyone was really reading my, admittedly, long posts...except maybe NSA's computers. I figure they probably don't have a problem with storage and most certainly won't have after they complete that Utah Spy Center. Did you mean Maguire?...Andrew? John?
Here's interesting info on Andrew. A story that main stream media doesn't want to touch.
Media Blackout – Wall Street Journal Hiding Andrew Maguire Revelation Of JP Morgan Chase Gold/Silver Manipulation
2nd April 2010
http://www.antifascistencyclopedia.com/?p=33419
As a Declaration of War on "We The People," Ryan's petulant proposal is quite clear. It's also quite clear that increasingly large numbers of informed citizens, "patriots," have chosen to no longer put up with this REPUBLICAN/TEA-PARTY, rich man, extremist crap. It's called The Occupy Movement and it's our best chance to reclaim Democracy and freedom.
I voted yes but...The bottom will drop out for EVERYONE. It wont matter if you only have a single dollar or one billion of them...Our money is worthless and it's only going to get worse. "Maybe" then the playing field will become more even...The big question is:As a people will we learn from our mistakes? Will we realize that sollutions only work when we fully understand the problem? Will we lick our wonds and change our way of thinking so that people and planet last...realizing that sure it's okay to make alot of money, but to reward blood sucking and knowingly allow for such belligerent buisness practices and hostle foreign policies that continue to rob people of their lives is NOT exceptable
Will we allow corporations to rule over the voice of the people? We MUST end Corperate Personhood and NEVER FORGET & NEVER ALLOW GREED TO OVERCOME THE IMPORTANCE OF "WE THE PEOPLE..."