Caregiving, in-home nursing care, rehabilitation and long-term care (assisted living/nursing home/hospice) should be provided by a different social safety net department because of it's specialized and complex nature that also requires licensure and auditing (making sure elderly and disabled aren't abused or neglected).
Single-payer, universal healthcare should also include (all but cosmetic and elective procedures):
- prescriptions
- mental care including therapy, psychiatry, rehab and commitment
- dental care
- vision care and prescription glasses
- hearing aids (avg cost is $3000 USD)
- mobility and safety aids for disabled and elderly
- gym memberships for people below a certain income level
- smoking, drinking and substance abuse intervention, counseling and cessation assistance (medications, tools, relocation assistance)
- weight-loss for obesity/significantly overweight with effective, tailored, holistic approaches
> gym memberships for people below a certain income level
why? this is a luxury. You don't need a gym membership - just jog around, it's free. Tax dollars are meant to pay for things that can't be free or have a free substitution.
Jogging around would not provide the same benefits as a proper strength training program. Theoretically bodyweight exercises could but that would require a level of gymnastics training that most people don't have.
> Jogging around would not provide the same benefits as a proper strength training program.
it is not the tax payer's responsibility to provide a proper strength training program for those who cannot afford it themselves. It is the tax payer's social responsibility to provide a service when said service is important (like healthcare) but is difficult for the poor to fund themselves.
Exercising is important, but it's free to do, so should not require a tax burden to provide anything of this nature for the poor. Health care cannot be free (nobody works for free). Therefore, it's important for the tax payer to fund it.
If you know they are overpriced, and assuming you are interested in earning money, why are you not selling hearing aids for cheaper than the incumbents and taking their margin?
If you’re not interested in earning money, then there are quite a few firms that are, so if you release the schematics and details of the hearing aid, surely they will run with it.
I'm sorry but that's wrong because that's trying to twist the meaning of words. No money, no healthcare isn't universal obviously. With no single-payer, government-funded, healthcare system, only doctors and patients who have to pay for everything themselves, that is in no way "universal healthcare."
The problem with charging poor people for healthcare is that they get sicker and sicker and then need emergency care, and that's more expensive than giving them free healthcare in the beginning.
It's unethical and classist to pick-and-choose who gets life-saving cancer treatment based on their income. Doctors with integrity would be abhorred at being presented with such a decision because it goes against the fundamental values of their profession.
> It's unethical and classist to pick-and-choose who gets life-saving cancer treatment based on their income.
Since we're talking ethics, do you also think universal healthcare should be provided by wealthy nations to all the world? Otherwise we are just picking and choosing based on where someone happens to be born, aren't we?
That question doesn't matter because national sovereignty would prevent other countries from doing that even if they wanted to. It's not a program it's even possible to consider without some really elaborate treaties that many countries would reject.
At the core of it what you're basically arguing is that nations are unethical because what citizenship someone holds influences things like their access to health care, and the solution to that would probably look a lot like the EU but completely borderless world-wide (with no immigrations or customs departments?)
I think you know how people would react to that. It's a pointless 'gotcha' question
The logistics don't seem difficult at all to me if there's a will. People tend to be pretty accommodating when it comes to letting you give them money. At the very least, countries can offer a "medical visa" option to visitors.
As for national borders being unethical by nature, if that logically follows then why not?
I certainly don't consider ethics a source of "gotcha" questions, but of real conundrums.
As far as I'm aware, the NHS provides free healthcare to people visiting the UK.
As regards providing free healthcare to anyone regardless of country, that seems next to impossible without providing the infrastructure necessary within the country they live, which would indeed be very difficult to work out. It seems like a good goal to work towards - everyone regardless of nation having access to reasonable quality healthcare.
> People tend to be pretty accommodating when it comes to letting you give them money.
Not really. A huge amount of charity money supposedly going to the poor in other countries is actually used to bribe officials in those countries to allow the aid to be delivered. Any attempt to give healthcare to people in those countries would also be seen as foreign interference, and suffer the same problems.
Ethics of some cancer treatments are dubious. (lifespan but not health) Depends on the cancer though.
Others are indeed effective - hormone blockers for certain reproductive system cancers, specific treatments for leukemia, surgeries where applicable and screening, toxic chemotherapy for cancers where it is effective or after surgery.
Advanced biologicals are often expensive because they can be and are not very effective there.
But there are some that are effective for autoimmune problems, those are problematic for our general healthcare in Poland with long conservative treatments with side effects while you're waiting to be qualified.
While I agree with you that universal healthcare should be "free", in most cases it's just "universal" healthcare and there is a marked difference between the two. Universal Healthcare only centralizes the insurance industry into a government managed program and determines cost by public committee rather than behind closed doors in boardrooms. That has been determined to reduce costs but not eliminate them. And the purpose is "access."
"Free Universal Healthcare" on the other hand focuses on delivering all healthcare at no cost for all common illnesses. To be clear, South Korea has Universal Healthcare and Bernie Sanders is proposing Free Universal Healthcare. But even Sanders' program would not guarantee that prescription drugs are free, they'll still be at maximum $200 per year per perscription. So, while I agree with you that it's "unethical and classist" to pick and choose who gets to live based on whether or not they can afford it, Universal Healthcare is not an end-all to this and is just part of the whole solution.
Also, to stay on topic, South Korea has the most consistently highest rated access to healthcare, but the issues presented in the movie Parasite still ring true for many Koreans.
Wow, that's cool. I wonder if vision, dental, medical, hospital, prescriptions and mental are all covered without fees?
The very poor in the US only get Medicaid (rarely Medicare, which requires paying into Social Security long enough).
Medicaid:
- It doesn't pay doctors, specialists and dentists enough, so they often treat patients poorly (spend less time, not thorough enough, don't order necessary tests).
- Medication is all paid-for with no co-pays (out-of-pocket expenses), but at a limited number of pharmacy brands and limited selection of medications (formulary).
- Emergency and necessary hospital care is completely paid-for.
- There is a limited selection of doctors and dentists available to choose from. Most, not all, are reviewed very poorly.
- Only one dentist cleaning visit a year is allowed even if the person needs it more frequently because they produce plaque faster.
- There are very few specialists who are assigned by the doctor, often with very, very long waiting lists. Furthermore, some specialties do away with waiting lists and make people call on a certain time at a certain day like animals for very few appointments. They make it a game to play with people's lives and waste their time.
- The choices of insurers who actually provide the Medicaid insurance is usually 1, 2 or maybe 3 in certain counties.
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Medicare (similar to typical US convoluted, private insurance):
- Has several confusing options, lots of rules and fine-print.
- Medication isn't covered, it needs Part D insurance or ExtraHelp.
- Hospital insurance requires enough taxes paid or paid Part A private insurance.
- Medical insurance requires enough taxes paid or paid Part B private insurance.
- Medigap private insurance can be needed to pay co-pays, deductibles, coinsurance but it doesn't cover long-term care (no LTC = $$$$), vision/eyeglasses, dental, hearing aids, or private-duty nursing.
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It's possible to have both Medicare and Medicaid, which means good insurance but with some out-of-pocket expenses.
Maybe Medicare improved without costs, for all, would be far, far better than people dying from cancer having to go to bankruptcy court rather than finish their bucket list?
> Wow, that's cool. I wonder if vision, dental, medical, hospital, prescriptions and mental are all covered without fees?
In Poland they are. With fixed monthly fee proportional to your income, 9%.
7.5% of it you can directly deduct from your income tax. So it's effectively 1.25% of your income.
The only additional money is for drugs (prescription ones too), but if the drug is expensive and you have a prescription you pay vastly reduced price, 50%, 30%, fixed low price, or free.
Of course there are wait times and you don't get top of the line materials so middle class people prefer to do dental and vision privately. No insurance needed there. You just pay 30$ to have your tooth fixed or 50$ for eye exam and new glasses if you pick cheap frames.
I don't want to crap all over Koreans or Korean culture, but there's one element that profoundly bothers me: the abandonment and shunning of the elderly. Many are homeless or live lonely lives in destitution and having to rely on charity food. Also, certain bridges have become notorious for mostly all elderly people committing suicide because they can't take it anymore. Korea has a lot going for it, so I hope it gets better in this regard and inequality.
The US and many other countries also need to address inequality seriously too, if not for moral reasons then for selfish, long-term GDP and consumer purchasing power reasons.
Yes, but it will take time because the acceleration is proportional to the amount present until it reaches a carrying capacity and burns itself out, or it slows in deceleration because of large quarantines / isolation orders. The problems are many:
1. The fed/state/county/local officials are placing prevention of panic ahead of telling the truth. NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said yesterday, with De Blasio next to him, that it's "only 2x more dangerous than the flu," when it's 20x-50x deadlier than influenza (because each flu strain differs).
2. Like a third-world country, the CDC is hiding information about tests performed and negative results.
3. The CDC is actively thwarting doctors from ordering SARS-cov-2 tests because of overly-restrictive PUI criteria that don't allow discretion of the doctor, so it's a virtual certainty people with COVID-19 are being told that they don't have it because some pinhead bureaucrat said so and they're going around in public infecting people before they come down with what they may assume is a bad flu.
4. COVID-19 takes a number of days to manifest itself, and it appears that people are contagious before they have symptoms, so they spread it unwittingly to potentially many others because it's so infectious.
5. Mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 won't be tested and reported, giving a false sense of the situation.
6. People who died before the SARS-cov-2 test was available haven't all been tested. There were several bodies that tested positive today in Washington state adding to the death count, but not every morgue is going to do this. Plus, it's possible many such bodies were released for burial and will never be tested.
7. It takes weeks to a month for recognition phase (the current situation in the US as of writing) to give way to initiation and acceleration phase of pandemic. I figure, based on the current trends, the US is about 2 weeks ± 4 days away from acceleration.[a, b] But, by that time, it's too late for many people because they were already infected by numerous infected people who weren't showing symptoms.
8. The poor and working class rarely have sick days and they can't afford to miss work, so they'll work anyhow. The prevalence of "F everyone, I have to take care of myself first" is what happens when people aren't paid living wages and guaranteed sick days off. And so, more people will be infected and more people will die because of greed.
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Then, once a country begins pandemic acceleration, it may last about a month ± 2 weeks before the number of infected drops enough that it's no longer pervasive. [a]
a. Based on China's Wuhan epidemic curve as a rough, approximate model.
b. Five phases of pan/epidemics: investigation, recognition, initiation, acceleration, deceleration
Clickbait, misrepresenting or exaggerated headlines and weak, stretching statements anger / disappoint me because they demonstrate a lack of integrity. Also, free speech has absolutely nothing to do with what content a company chooses to display. Wouldn't a more factual headline, as mentioned on John Oliver a few hours prior to this writing, be "Fox News downplayed, misinformed viewers and trivialized COVID-19"? FN may not have yet started practicing journalistic integrity, but that's beside the point.
The internally-inconsistent premise FB is based on, keeping in touch with friends, ultimately leaves nothing new and no mystery to talk about.. and no point to ever meet, effectively creating distance from and losing friends. Isn't that an awesome technology?
Single-payer, universal healthcare should also include (all but cosmetic and elective procedures):
- prescriptions
- mental care including therapy, psychiatry, rehab and commitment
- dental care
- vision care and prescription glasses
- hearing aids (avg cost is $3000 USD)
- mobility and safety aids for disabled and elderly
- gym memberships for people below a certain income level
- smoking, drinking and substance abuse intervention, counseling and cessation assistance (medications, tools, relocation assistance)
- weight-loss for obesity/significantly overweight with effective, tailored, holistic approaches