Just been dealing with the pharmacy and our health insurance

[xiphias]

Can anyone give me an example of ANY problem that we'd have with socialized medicine that we don't have right now with our current health care system?

I mean, if I'm going to have to go through byzantine, bizzare, arbitrary bureaucracy and have to bang my head against walls and argue with people to have simple, commonsense health care taken care of, I'd like to at least know that it was available to everyone.

Comments

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

If by "socialized medicine" you mean a single-payer system, and the payer is the government, I blanch. You'd be amazed at the number of patients we get from not only Canada but other countries with socialized medicine. IMO, there isn't enough money in any country's economy to provide everyone with all the healthcare they need. This is not because anyone's being money-grubbing. It's because we can do so many amazing things which require scarce resources. So things get prioritized. For example, I've seen patients who came here for certain expensive diagnostic tests to determine if they needed corrective surgery for a life threatening condition. (Trying to be general enough that I don't reveal too much about where I work.) These same patients would get immediate care if they collapsed and were near death, and the care would be very good. But to find out if they need the surgery in time to prevent the collapse and near-death experience is not possible for them. The waiting list for this very common procedure is over a year. Some of them wouldn't survive that long. This is just one example, from just one country.

Assuming for the moment that I'm correct about the not-enough-money-in-the-economy thing, here's my modest proposal:

First we find about 15 good doctors with expertise covering all medical specialties. Then we lock them in a room and don't let them out until they decide what is the single most important medical service to provide to everyone in the country. (define "everyone" as you will.)

Then we find about 15 good economists and accountants, and lock THEM in a room until they figure out what it will cost to provide said medical service to everyone in the country and how much money we'd have left.

Repeat the process until we run out of money. Then everyone gets the defined services just by showing identification, and private insurance is used for the rest. This would put people like me on the unemployement line, but it would vastly improve access to the most important healthcare.

In Massachusetts, many years ago, the doctors did get together and rank all their services in order of relative importance. They did this voluntarily, btw. Each service was assigned a relative value unit. For awhile, doctors in this state mostly got paid based on the RVUs of the services they provided. Then the Powers That Be decided this consituted price fixing, tossed the system out, and gave us Medicare and Medicaid. Happy, happy, joy, joy.