I was born in Canada for free, it’s why I am such a retard. The doctor had one arm and kept dropping me on my head on the dirt floor. I was slipping like a greased pig. Then they cut the wrong umbilical cord which is why I now identify as a woman.
I don’t know all the detail about Obamacare but from what I understand one of the main reasons why it wasn’t going to work is because insurance companies were largely in control. In other countries that have “free” medical care there are no insurance companies involved. Some places have free prescription drugs, not Canada but some people have additional insurance (often benefits from work) that cover that plus dental costs, glasses, etc. There are also private clinics where you can get faster and probably better treatment, aside from elective surgeries people only go there when otherwise there is a long waiting list. The healthcare system is not quite what it used to be a while back, the population has grown and instead of investing in healthcare the funding has been cut.
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You mean you weren’t born in an igloo like the rest of us? Not sure I believe your story.
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What gave it away!
I was born in Canada though, in Labrador.
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So you really were born in an igloo! Who would have guessed?
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To be honest, I don’t even know what the goal of obamacare was. I mean the policy, not what the politicians said about it.
It functioned like a big wealth redistribution program. The part of the problem is what they considered rich, which was basically anybody with a full time job. I don’t know who if anybody benefited, the deductibles on the plans were sky high and everybody who could opt out, did.
Personally, my insurance costs doubled in 2 years, literally. Not an exaggeration. I got a 3% pay raise and a 6% pay cut in the same year. The 6% was my insurance going up…
That was the effect for me…Oh yeah, the insurance covered less and the deductibles went up too. It should be a shock to no one why it’s hated so much.
It sounds like a scheme for insurance companies to rob everyone with the support of poor people.
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Yup, nothing like a balmy -10 deg. Celsius in the spring! My parents told me they used to paint the road lines on top of the ice in the winter.
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For something like that to work it has to be a nationalized healthcare system, not a wealth redistribution scheme involving corporations.
They are the ones who benefited the most… When people talk about the cronie establishment, that;s what they mean, crap like this.
You didn’t have to know anything else about the deal to know the average Joe was about to get screwed… The insurance companies had no complaints. They didn’t muster a give-a-damn. They knew they were fixing to get paid.
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Yes yes and yes.
One reason. Not the only one by far, but a big one I agree.
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Problem with that in part, is something you just said, they cut funding. You are totally at their mercy. What’s to stop them from cutting more? The other problem with that in another part was something else you said, the population went up. So now you have less to spread among more.
The U.S. is too damn big to pull it off successfully. I think small governments can handle it, but 330 million people is just too hard.
Healthcare costs need fixin’ here, but ceding the power to the fed is not tenable. We can think outside the box and come up with better solutions then what everybody else does. That was the point of this country in the first place.
Why else are healthcare costs so high in the US? Even prescription drugs are much more expensive than in Canada or Europe. Before COVID, it was common for Americans to cross the border into Canada just to get their prescriptions filled.
I don’t think the size of the country really makes a difference, it’s more a question of having funding available for it. A country that is heavily in debt and spending trillions on the military will have a harder time than one that doesn’t have those things going on. And now with COVID taking its toll on the economy, the chance of anything like that happening is much lower.
Doug Ford, Ontario’s Trump wannabe premier, was saying a while back that he supported a “two-tier” healthcare system, meaning that those who can afford it will pay and get better care while the rest of us get treated in a hallway or storage room. I imagine things will get worse here because before COVID we already had hospitals in Ontario at 120%+ of capacity on a regular basis, now there is less money to go around and waiting lists for surgeries and such are longer than ever.
I don’t have the desire or the energy to go back around this topic in this thread. Also, I already agreed prescription costs were higher here.
A very large part of that lower price is the government subsidizing prescription costs in the EU.
Yes and it was common for Canadians to go across the border here to get procedures and other things done.
Exactly. The size of the population is one of the major determinants of “having funding available”. As are the % of population with pre-existing conditions.
Almost every developed country with covid now
Yes, which is a problem but not the only problem. Besides which we subsidize a lot of EU military costs in addition to our own. The scale of costs is different for HC regardless.
What is often missed in there arguments @chris_ottawa is a national will to make fundamental change.
The second anyone starts talking about things (as an example) like futile and expensive things like end-of-Life Intensive Care…there are screams of things like “Death PANELS!” and “They want to kill Grandma!”
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I don’t think limiting a resource (which are funded by a pool of payer) like health care at certain ages is unreasonable. Just pain killers and basic treatments if you are over 90 is fine by me. Slightly more treatments if you are 85-90, more treatments from 80-85…
We should also allow euthanasia. We can save money and reduce suffering by just allowing people to check out when ready.
Oh, size does matter, because infrastructure and resources matter. And given the fact that the interaction point between the public and the government is already nightmarish, letting them handling our healthcare scares the shit out of me. Look, I just went through a a few rounds with the government and it took months to solve a problem which turned out to be a mistake on my their part.
I told the lady working with me, that if this was a healthcare issue, I would be ten years dead before they approved my treatment. She got a good laugh, but I was only half kidding.
As far as our military spending, well we have too. Like it or not we are not just the military for the U.S. but most of North America and western Europe (with certain exceptions). I don’t want to be the world’s cops, but until our allies pony up for their own militaries it’s either going to be the U.S., Russia or China. Who do you want running defense for Canada, the U.S. or China?
I know you have a small military, but could Canada take on China? Hell no, but the U.S. can.
“In a place you won’t talk about at parties, you like me on that wall, you need me on that wall!”
Cuba!
That shit literally happened in the UK. I don’t remember the exact story but a little kid with a serious illness was denied further treatment and there was nothing more they could do for him. They didn’t have the money or the options to try anything else. If I find the story I post it…