Why do YOU think Healthcare is a Right and not a Privilege?

[Clone]

The right wingers who are pro life should also be pro free healthcare. For whatever reasons they aren't.

[Tyrianth]

The right wingers who are pro life should also be pro free healthcare. For whatever reasons they aren't.

They don't care about the baby once it's born.

[Deleted]

I believe everyone has the right to free, life saving procedures and preventative medicine, not a very good society if people are just "screw the poor, their own fault for getting ill!". I don't think all procedures and treatments should be free though, anything that is purely cosmetic for example should not be free.

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They don't care about the baby once it's born.

They do care, once its mother claims benefits for the child, or the child commits a crime or what ever due to poor upbringing, then they say that people shouldn't have kids if they can't afford them etc

[Feahnor]

Healthcare can't be free.

The cost of managing healthcare professionals is too high.

...in the US. Other countries seem to do fine. Fix your shit, it's not normal to charge people tens (or hundreds) of thousands $ for a simple visit to the ER. Last week I went to the ER with my 4-months baby because of an allergy. Do you know how much I paid? 6€. 6 fucking euros.

I don't think you need to make all parts of society productive. It's not always a good trade off. If you spend $500,000 making someone productive, and he provides less than $500,000 productivity, you've just negatively impacted your society right? Why shouldn't I just invest that money in young kids' education for example?

In Europe you can study to be a doctor for less than 7.000€ (around 1000 a year), even free in some countries. Again, fix your shit people. Stop with the silly excuses.

[Deleted]

I wonder when the first americans start to talk about free speech as a "privillege and no right" on social media.

[petej0]

Everyone can afford this service? Are you lowering the cost of the service or raising the ability for everyone to pay the current rate?

Both, we can lower the cost by consolidating payers and negotiating the price for services. Everyone pays via taxes. Health care just becomes a budget item in our spending. We no longer have budget items for Medicaid, Medicare, VA. We have a single budget item labeled "Health Care" which handles reimbursements to hospitals for the care they provide.

[Dragoncurry]

...in the US. Other countries seem to do fine. Fix your shit, it's not normal to charge people tens (or hundreds) of thousands $ for a simple visit to the ER. Last week I went to the ER with my 4-months baby because of an allergy. Do you know how much I paid? 6€. 6 fucking euros.

In Europe you can study to be a doctor for less than 7.000€ (around 1000 a year), even free in some countries. Again, fix your shit people. Stop with the silly excuses.

No one has any excuses. It's great that you can study to be a doctor for less than 7,000 Euros. Trust me, we would be beyond ecstatic if we could do that here. Do you really think ANY human being in our education system wants to come out with half a million of debt?

You also misunderstood my 500K comment. That's the cost of treatment. Harvoni is like 30K a bottle. For many complex cases, you'll need to spend 500K+ to make someone "healthy" or "productive". I suggested that it wasn't worth the trade off if they can't provide at least that much benefit to society.

Also, just because you paid 6 euros doesn't mean it didn't cost the hospital more than 6 euros to do the treatment, house you and your baby, capital expenses of the equipment, administrative salaries of the people entering you into the system, and the cost of services of the doctors taking care of your child, let alone the cost of the drugs etc.

Additionally in the US, you have legal issues with physicians needing to cover themselves, and that's a lot of additional cost.

I really think you don't know what you're asking when you say "fix your shit".

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Both, we can lower the cost by consolidating payers and negotiating the price for services. Everyone pays via taxes. Health care just becomes a budget item in our spending. We no longer have budget items for Medicaid, Medicare, VA. We have a single budget item labeled "Health Care" which handles reimbursements to hospitals for the care they provide.

Again, not so simple. This reimbursement has to cover all of the costs of the salaries of service and administration, capital expenditures including land and equipment, drug costs, legal, risk, IT infrastructure and more. If you consolidate payors and reduce the reimbursement, then this will not allow hospitals to necessarily provide better care as hospitals will HAVE to make cuts. They have to become more efficient as well. Hospital administration (if you've never worked in one) moves at the pace of mud.

A single payor system also standardizes salaries, makes people who are more skillful not rewarded, etc etc. Now you COULD reward them more, but then you have to allocate all of this within a fixed incoming revenue pool, and other physicians will be underpaid. There are a lot of problems. The original purpose of the AMA, other than monopolizing medical schools and generating a fuckton of revenue, was to increase the skillcap of the physicians in the US through a $ incentive driven model.

There are a lot of moving pieces that you're glossing over, and I haven't even touched on drug costs as set by a certain pharmaceutical industry.

[petej0]

Again, not so simple. This reimbursement has to cover all of the costs of the salaries of service and administration, capital expenditures including land and equipment, drug costs, legal, risk, IT infrastructure and more. If you consolidate payors and reduce the reimbursement, then this will not allow hospitals to necessarily provide better care as hospitals will HAVE to make cuts. They have to become more efficient as well.

There are a lot of moving pieces that you're glossing over.

Nobody is glossing over anything. The Doctor has a salary, the Nurse has a salary, the equipment has a monthly cost, the building/property has a monthly cost, there is a cost to heat, cool, provide water, electricity etc. These all factor into the cost of treatment. The treatment should be priced accordingly.

If you consolidate payers, you wont need to process as much paper work or have staff that are required to learn different Insurance Systems and reimbursement codes. One system, one set of paper work, less administrative staff which lowers cost. Reimbursement rates can be negotiated, it would be a sticking point but its doable.

Hospitals are making a killing. $21,000 bill for heart burn??? This type of stuff should not happen.

[Deleted]

People are entitled to access to healthcare?

I don't think so, but that is the topic of debate.

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To be clear, the entitlement doesn't require doctors exist. Only that the state be willing to persuade free citizens into choosing the profession.

If its a right, they are required too, I think Universal healthcare is good policy (albeit with some unpleasant implications) But i most strenuously do not think its an actual right (or should be).

But I'm still not seeing how that paradigm requires slavery.

In a world where healthcare is a positive right, the agency of medical personnel is by necessity curtailed.

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I wonder when the first americans start to talk about free speech as a "privillege and no right" on social media.

Free speech is a negative right, healthcare is a positive right - You are comparing apples and oranges.

[Deleted]

In a world where healthcare is a positive right, the agency of medical personnel is by necessity curtailed.

This abstraction applies to any interaction with the state: if you're a subject of a jurisdiction your agency is curtailed in some manner. Which, I mean, it's an alright thing to think, but it's also a weird and uncommon paradigm (reminiscent of the sovereign citizen movement).
Is that what what you're hinting at?
More down to earth interpretations of what freedom is reject that abstraction. That's why I'm insisting that doctors are choosing those shackles.

[Dragoncurry]

Nobody is glossing over anything. The Doctor has a salary, the Nurse has a salary, the equipment has a monthly cost, the building/property has a monthly cost, there is a cost to heat, cool, provide water, electricity etc. These all factor into the cost of treatment. The treatment should be priced accordingly.

If you consolidate payers, you wont need to process as much paper work or have staff that are required to learn different Insurance Systems and reimbursement codes. One system, one set of paper work, less administrative staff which lowers cost. Reimbursement rates can be negotiated, it would be a sticking point but its doable.

Hospitals are making a killing. $21,000 bill for heart burn??? This type of stuff should not happen.

That bill makes sense to me. What occurred here is that the patient has no idea what kind of services he's actually paying for. He went there for treatment but came out with 1,000 extra things for them "to diagnose the issue". That's bullshit don't you think?

He should have declined every single one of them from the prescribing physician, especially one who is clearly marking them up. He should have bought his own tylenol from Amazon, instead of from the hospital. I don't take a single thing from a visit to the ER except the room itself, which is already at a disproportionately high cost.

This is what I mean. People just don't know wtf is going on half the time. A single payor wouldn't reduce this guy's bill. He would still receive a ridiculously high bill because he would have 300 HCPC codes that describe his service instead of like...3.

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I don't think so, but that is the topic of debate.

Isn't a citizens' entitlement to a right dependent on what the leaders in the country decide it to be?

[petej0]

That bill makes sense to me. What occurred here is that the patient has no idea what kind of services he's actually paying for. He went there for treatment but came out with 1,000 extra things for them "to diagnose the issue". That's bullshit don't you think?

He should have declined every single one of them from the prescribing physician, especially one who is clearly marking them up. He should have bought his own tylenol from Amazon, instead of from the hospital. I don't take a single thing from a visit to the ER except the room itself, which is already at a disproportionately high cost.

Read the entire 11 pages!! Hospitals make a killing charging patients for items and procedures with a price that has no basis.

Orstad also refused to comment on any of the specifics in Janice S.'s bill, including the seemingly inflated charges for all the lab work. "I've told you I don't think a bill like this is relevant," he explained. "Very few people actually pay those rates."

But Janice S. was asked to pay them. Moreover, the chargemaster rates are relevant, even for those unlike her who have insurance. Insurers with the most leverage, because they have the most customers to offer a hospital that needs patients, will try to negotiate prices 30% to 50% above the Medicare rates rather than discounts off the sky-high chargemaster rates. But insurers are increasingly losing leverage because hospitals are consolidating by buying doctors' practices and even rival hospitals. In that situation — in which the insurer needs the hospital more than the hospital needs the insurer — the pricing negotiation will be over discounts that work down from the chargemaster prices rather than up from what Medicare would pay. Getting a 50% or even 60% discount off the chargemaster price of an item that costs $13 and lists for $199.50 is still no bargain. "We hate to negotiate off of the chargemaster, but we have to do it a lot now," says Edward Wardell, a lawyer for the giant health-insurance provider Aetna Inc.

That so few consumers seem to be aware of the chargemaster demonstrates how well the health care industry has steered the debate from why bills are so high to who should pay them.

The expensive technology deployed on Janice S. was a bigger factor in her bill than the lab tests. An "NM MYO REST/SPEC EJCT MOT MUL" was billed at $7,997.54. That's a stress test using a radioactive dye that is tracked by an X-ray computed tomography, or CT, scan. Medicare would have paid Stamford $554 for that test.

...

Steve H.'s bill for his day at Mercy contained all the usual and customary overcharges. One item was "MARKER SKIN REG TIP RULER" for $3. That's the marking pen, presumably reusable, that marked the place on Steve H.'s back where the incision was to go. Six lines down, there was "STRAP OR TABLE 8X27 IN" for $31. That's the strap used to hold Steve H. onto the operating table. Just below that was "BLNKT WARM UPPER BDY 42268" for $32. That's a blanket used to keep surgery patients warm. It is, of course, reusable, and it's available new on eBay for $13. Four lines down there's "GOWN SURG ULTRA XLG 95121" for $39, which is the gown the surgeon wore. Thirty of them can be bought online for $180. Neither Medicare nor any large insurance company would pay a hospital separately for those straps or the surgeon's gown; that's all supposed to come with the facility fee paid to the hospital, which in this case was $6,289.

This is what I mean. People just don't know wtf is going on half the time. A single payor wouldn't reduce this guy's bill. He would still receive a ridiculously high bill because he would have 300 HCPC codes that describe his service instead of like...3.

The Government would not pay these rates, because they dont pay these rates vie Medicare now. So I would have to respectfully disagree with you.

[Deleted]

This abstraction applies to any interaction with the state: if you're a subject of a jurisdiction your agency is curtailed in some manner. Which, I mean, it's an alright thing to think, but it's also a weird and uncommon paradigm (reminiscent of the sovereign citizen movement).
Is that what what you're hinting at?

Yes, pretty much, its an interesting paradox that we can only be free while having your agency curtailed (because the man marooned on an island "isn't free").

More down to earth interpretations of what freedom is reject that abstraction. That's why I'm insisting that doctors are choosing those shackles.

Yes, we choose.

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Isn't a citizens' entitlement to a right dependent on what the leaders in the country decide it to be?

Yes and no, if its a right, it is generally beyond politicians to choose, a politician could make glasses a right, or not, but couldn't get rid of free speech, F.E.

[BananaHandsB]

This is a troll thread intentionally using some of the most ignorant arguments against universal healthcare possible. Stop responding ppl.

O and it's Jaylock...come on now.

[Mistame]

Free speech is a negative right, healthcare is a positive right - You are comparing apples and oranges.

Personally, I don't support the notion of "positive rights", because a "right" in this context refers to something that can't be denied. As such, it's inherently incompatible with actual (negative) rights due to the fact that it "entitles" you to resources that belong to someone else.

[Deleted]

Personally, I don't support the notion of "positive rights", because a "right" in this context refers to something that can't be denied. As such, it's inherently incompatible with actual (negative) rights due to the fact that it "entitles" you to resources that belong to someone else.

I agree, positive rights aren't actually rights as far as i'm concerned.

[GotMoxie]

Ignoring the obvious stupidity of the OP, trolling or not, it's a right.

Common sense, compassion and coming from a country where I've seen it save multiple lives ingrained in me that healthcare is a right.

[Deleted]

Ignoring the obvious stupidity of the OP, trolling or not, it's a right.

Common sense, compassion and coming from a country where I've seen it save multiple lives ingrained in me that healthcare is a right.

Is water, food, housing rights?

[GotMoxie]

Of course.

[Mistame]

Of course.

No, they're not. You're not entitled to any of those things. You have to pay for them.