ckaihatsu wrote:Ouch. I thought I told the *funny* jokes....
I just meant that you were sounding rather *socialist* with your statement, so hence the one-liner.
* Back to the drawing board *
Again, it all depends on what you mean by socialism.
I am first and foremost for democracy
within a democracy, I do tend to more social policies as far as "primary necessities" are involved. Meaning basic health insurance, education, infrastructure, etc.
When it comes to "wants" and "luxury" then I am as "capitalists" as they come.
For more details:
For instance, as a society, we already decided that nobody will get "turned down" at a hospital for medical care regardless of whether insured or not. The only difference is that if they are not insured, we will send them a 100k bill that will bankrupt them and when they go home they will not be able to pay any of the $500/month medications that we prescribe them. So not only we do the work, we ruin their finantial life, but lung term they don't really have any medical care.
Imagine a patient with atrial fibrillation that comes to the hospital. They come with a stroke. We administer TPA, we take them to the cath lab and do a thrombectomy (a neurointerventionalist goes through the blood vessels and sucks the clot out) then they spend a few days in the ICU, and the reminder of a week in the general/neuro floor. They receive physical therapy, they receive top notch care. Now patient is ready to be discharged, he/she needs anticoagulation for life (had a stroke due to Afib) and the options are eliquis/xarelto which costs $200-$400usd/month (FOR LIFE!) depending on coupons and shit... OR warfarin/coumadin, which is cheaper but it requires very regular monitoring (can be just as expensive long time because patients often have to go to the doctor a half a dozen times per month at least until they find the right dose which could take a long time. Eitherway, without insurance, all the work put into this patient is going to go to shit. The procedure alone costs from 10 to 50 THOUSAND dollars. By the time you add on the ICU stay, all the meds, physical therapy, ambulance, etc we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The only question is who pays the tab. The guy cannot pay insurance right? well chances are he/she doesnt have a few hundred thousands dollars under the matress and chances are that he/she won't be able to get that ammount of money anytime this century either. So it is up to either the goverment or the hospital to take care of this cost. The hospital won't take it from the CEO's pay or the doctors (you might not get any doctors if on top of 10years of training, 500k of student debt, you take a big chunk of their salary) so usually this is billed to medicaid (goverment) or billed to other patients (via their insurance). Eitherway we end up paying for this shit. Again, wether people get care or not has already been decided for decades!.