[quote]Aragorn wrote:
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
[quote]Zeppelin795 wrote:
[quote]usmccds423 wrote:
“Universal health insurance does not necessarily mean universal access to health care. In practice, many countries promise universal coverage but ration care or have extremely long waiting lists for treatment. Those countries that have single-payer systems or systems heavily weighted toward government control are the most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on the choice of physician, and other barriers to care.”
“Those countries with national health care systems that work better, such as France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, are successful to the degree that they incorporate market mechanisms such as competition, cost-consciousness, market prices, and consumer choice, and eschew centralized government control.”
“While other countries spend considerably less than the U.S. on health care both as a percentage of GDP and per capita…the average annual increase for per capita health spending in European countries was 5.55 percent, only slightly lower than the United States? 6.21 percent. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Europeans face steeper medical bills in the future in their cash-strapped governments. In short, there is no free lunch.”
“While no country with universal coverage is contemplating abandoning a universal system, the broad and growing trend in countries with national health care systems is to move away from centralized government control and to introduce more market oriented features. As Richard Saltman and Josep Figueras of the World Health Organization put it, The presumption of public primacy is being reassessed. Thus, even as the U.S. debates adopting a government-run system, countries with those systems are debating how to make their systems look more like the U.S.”
Horizontal inequity in healthcare access under the universal coverage in Japan; 1986?2007.Authors:Ryo Watanabe
Hideki Hashimoto∗.
Affiliation:Department of Health Economics and Epidemiology Research, The University of Tokyo School of Public Health, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.
Source:In Social Science & Medicine October 2012 75(8):1372-1378.
Publisher:Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract:Universal coverage of healthcare aims at securing access to appropriate healthcare for all at an affordable cost. Since 1961, Japan?s national health insurance has provided an equal package of benefits including outpatient, inpatient, dental, and pharmaceutical services. Reduced copayment and other welfare programs are available to the elderly. However, social health insurance may not be a panacea to achieve healthcare for all, especially when facing household impoverishment due to economic stagnation. Using time-series cross-sectional data of a nationally representative survey of Japan, we assessed the degree of inequity in healthcare access in terms of the ?equal treatment for equal needs? concept, to identify the impact of changing economic conditions on people?s healthcare access. Concentration indices of actual healthcare use (CM) and standardized health status as a marker of healthcare needs (CN) were obtained. We decomposed CM to identify factors contributing to inequalities in healthcare use. Results showed that horizontal inequities in healthcare access in favor of the rich gradually increased over the period with a widening health gap among the poor. The inequality in favor of the rich was specifically observed among people aged 20?64 years, whereas high horizontal equity was achieved among those aged >65 years. Decomposition of CM also demonstrated that income and health status were major contributors to widening inequality, which implies that changes in household economic conditions and copayment policy during the study period were responsible for the diminished horizontal equity. Our results suggest that the achievement of horizontal equity through universal coverage should be regarded as an ongoing project that requires continuous redesign of contribution and benefit in the nation?s healthcare system…
Document Type:Article.
ISSN:0277-9536.
DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.06.006.
Accession Number:S0277953612004844.
Copyright:Copyright Ã???Ã???Ã??Ã?© 2012 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved…
Database: ScienceDirect.
It appears to me that universal health insurance does not, “level the playing field,” like so many think it does. As the first article points out, nations using a universal system are modifying thier approach to include free market mechanisms to better the system.
This issue reminds me a lot of the China. A governement controlled economy that in recent years/decades has shifted to, gasp, many free market principles. Why do they do this? Because they work… [/quote]
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-08-23/opinions/36874710_1_government-run-insurance-health-care-medical-insurance
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I posted 2 articles. The second, is peer reviewed research, that contradicts several aspects of Reid’s opinion piece. [/quote]
Don’t bother. Facts mean nothing, clearly. He’s so boxed up inside his ideology he can’t even see his own nose. I gave up a long time ago after 3 or 4 evasions on his part and then the final straw was when he didn’t realize that after Vietnam Indonesia was our biggest ally against communist sphere of influence expansion in the entire Asiatic ring (this has changed with India over the years, but in the 70s this was true). He also failed to realize that the prevailing fears by both the US and the Indonesian government–along with other western gov’ts–was that FRETILIN would establish a communist state on Indonesia’s border if successful.
In other words he ignores or fails to understand precisely 100% of the geopolitical climate at the time.
He’d rather blame “defense contractors making billions” for what was obviously a power politics consideration.
That doesn’t excuse the human rights abuse or the absolute indiscriminate executions by Indonesian forces, but it DOES explain precisely why the war happened and was supported materially by the US and other countries after Vietnam and Korea. And it has nothing to do with corporate news sources.[/quote]
Wow what academic fortitude! You are something to be amazed. The abuse could have been stopped but they weren’t and they were also not in the pages of the corporate news sources either but POL POT’s genocide was. How come one genocide deserved coverage in American news but the other did not? And what a frightening organization the Fretlin was, if I had only been alive at the time I could have remember how the public were shaking in their boots about the prospect of it’s take over of the world. The Fretlin was formed to claim East Timor’s independence from Portugal and then from Indonesia. When it’s leader was murdered by Indonesia’s armed forces then the armed wing of The Fretlin attacked back guerilla style.
You’d rather blame a communist hobgoblin than to admit that there was a big financial incentive for huge corporations., and geopolitics are always connected.
When the filtered news is your source then you get filtered information which is what you base your arguments on so everything that follows is based on untruths.