Hard News: A voice of reason and authority
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James, oh James. If only I knew what a hike weiner was and where I should take it? Maybe to the zoo or something, I just don't know. What I do know, of course, is that you are confused about a lot of things. Perhaps a little less Fox TV of an evening would be a step in the right direction.
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How telling is it when even Treasury is ambivalent at best, and sceptical at worst, towards subsidising private health insurance?
Even the free-market godfather Miltion Friedman once pointed out:
Health insurance premiums increased 78 percent since 2000, compared to wages increasing 20 percent, while over the same time period employers offering health benefits decreased from 69 percent to 61 percent (Kaiser Foundation 2006). In 2006, Ford Motor Company had a $3.5 billion health care liability, with a $1,100 per vehicle health care cost. In contrast, Japanese manufacturers spent $450 per car on health care for vehicles made in the United States (Associated Press 2006; McDonald 2006). General Motors spent $1,525 for every U.S. built vehicle compared to Toyota’s spending $97 per vehicle in Japan in 2005 (French 2006).
In the absence of universal healthcare, industry is forced to pick up the slack. And a large part of the premiums increase can be attributed to malpractice litigation.
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single digit thousands of which we paid about $1000 out of pocket
And that's a good deal, in your mind? Awesomesauce.
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malpractice litigation
The threat of which looms so largely over the heads of doctors that the USA's caesarean rate in some hospitals is nearly 50%. Since we're talking about birthing babies, and whatnot.
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Epidural injections seem to have about a 50% success rate - if you still had pain after 6 weeks (my usual recovery time) I can see why you'd consider it, but I can also see why it wouldn't be on the list of first interventions given that people tend to get better within that time regardless of treatment.
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James B:
but the biggest positive technological change for the environment and our lives will be safe small local nuclear power stations, if the environmentalists let it happen!!
The environmentalists won't shoot it down. The bean counters will.
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$22k for a pregancy is not anything like normal.
It's not standard (see the article) but shouldn't be possible.
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Joe,
No I am not misinformed or a scoundrel. This happened to her. As I understand it there are waiting lists for most heart related procedures, so why would a waiting list for anything else be a surprise? Go to the UK, Canada etc, it is all the same.Sure James, whatever you want to pull out of your boytalk butt. You're idly slandering people whose consummate professionalism saved my life, and that REALLY pisses me off.
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Well of course Jones. That article you linked to was from the British Medical Journal, what would they know about treating anything? Britain has "socialized" medicine how could they possibly treat anyone without first consulting an insurance company and putting the problem before the accountants? and how, may I ask, are the Pharmaceutical companies going to make anything if you don't use drugs as your first port of call in any procedure?.
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No thank you very much, you can keep your national health nonsense and I and the 70 or 80% of Americans who are happy with their healthcare will have healthcare when we need it.
From Pew, this month:
59% of Americans believe their healthcare is average or below average compared with other industrialised nations (all of which, of course, have national health systems).
39% believe it is above average.
The only group in which a majority (66%) believed it was above average was ... Conservative Republicans.
FWIW, our family's experience of the New Zealand health system in recent years has been stellar, and that includes a series of breast cancer procedures and a comprehensive follow-up process that still continues.
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Read an article a while back
Great reference.
Anyway I had a look. Its all corporate hype so far, no independent analysis. Its great that reactors that small can be made, for all the space travel our descendants will want to embark on.Still 5 years away apparently from predicted production start up, they are not cheap and still produce radioactive waste.
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Maori and general treatment of them is one area that perplexes him.
Sofie, you may need to remind your therapist of his homeland's sterling treatment of its own minorities.
Like Uyghurs. Especially talkative ones like Rebiya Kadeer. Maori Television don't seem to have trouble joining the dots.
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James, you are hilarious.
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FWIW, our family's experience of the New Zealand health system in recent years has been stellar, and that includes a series of breast cancer procedures and a comprehensive follow-up process that still continues.
And while my experience in the public health system has been not quite so stellar (but not a quantum singularity of suck either), I'm not feeling any guilt that my partner's heart by-pass a few years back was done privately. Can't fault the quality of care there either.
And just because healthcare here (or in Australia or Canada or Michael Moore's beloved NHS) is far from perfect, I'd still rather not be sick and uninsured in the US if you don't mind...
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My Godmother in Chch got a cancerous lump on her chest, had to wait over 6 months to see a specialist by which time the cancer was inoperable, so now she is on palliative care waiting to die.
If your GrandMother and her cirumstances as described by you are real then you should call a health reporter - the system that she has paid for all her life through taxation has failed her in an almost unprecendented way. Most people with suspected tumors see a specialist within 24 hours, waiting six months is unthinkable. You or someone in your family need to speak out. People need to lose their jobs. Heads need to roll. You have a moral obligation to prevent the same thing from happening to others.
If she or your story aren't real then you really are a total fucking loser.
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Mark Steyn notes an interesting point on American Healthcare:
America is the Afghanistan of the Western world: That's to say, it has a slightly higher infant-mortality rate than other developed nations (there are reasons for that which I'll discuss in an upcoming column). That figure depresses our overall "life expectancy at birth." But, if you can make it out of diapers, you'll live longer than you would pretty much anywhere else. By age 40, Americans' life expectancy has caught up with Britons'. By 60, it equals Germany's. At the age of 80, Americans have greater life expectancy than Swedes.
Basically American healthcare fixes up rich people better than most and older people are richer than young people.
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As long as we're doing the 'anecdata' thing, my lovely 90-year-old grandfather was recently admitted to a local hospital after a heart attack. He stayed in hospital for ten days, during which he received excellent care and was tested for everything under the sun. (No dementia! Hooray.) He is now at home with health-system-provided three-weekly nurse visits, physiotherapy and a snazzy new wheelie-walker. His house has been modified for easy mobility. All of this was free. At no point was it suggested that he would have to be put to death for being too old. Nor did we have to deal with one single insurance company bureaucrat and battle for his care.
Last year, my friend went to the USA for a holiday and bought travel insurance. She was admitted to a hospital while there for pelvic pain and stayed three days. She had some jello, ice chips and some pelvic exams and was eventually released. The bill? 13,000 US dollars. Which she then battled the insurance company for months so they'd pay. It was hugely stressful and annoying and stupid, and achieved nothing for her health whatsoever.
My aunt and uncle in Louisiana are still paying off the bills from my cousin's car accident over 20 years ago.
I'm just sayin'.
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FWIW, our family's experience of the New Zealand health system in recent years has been stellar, and that includes a series of breast cancer procedures and a comprehensive follow-up process that still continues.
I must say my own family's experiences of the public health system have been good ones. It sometimes takes a while for the wheels to turn, but once they start turning they can go very fast indeed. As an example, my boy needed a hip operation. It was relatively minor, but the day after they diagnosed him he was in surgery.
I've been watching the US healthcare debate with some interest and amzement. There are millions of uninsured people in the US who struggle for basic access to healthcare. This simply wouldn't happen in NZ.
Fox News' Beck and Hannity are spreading deliberate misinformation. The other night the Daily Show had a clip of Glen Beck in early 2008 complaining about the state of the US health system and how it was third world and needed to be reformed. He had just come out of hospital and was horrified by the treatment he received. Today Beck is saying the US system is the best in the world and that Obama's reforms will wreck it. So what changed since 2008? Beck moved from CNN to Fox News. Says it all.
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My anecdata: My first son (just got another one, yay!) suffered from a stroke a little after he was born. He was rushed to NICU and we spent 3 nerve wracking weeks there, during which my opinion of the NZ health system climbed dramatically. After stabilization and release, the hospital system itself did everything they could to see to his needs, but a number of people suggested we pursue ACC for him, as the cause of the stroke was never actually known, and it was put down in the end as an accident. It took some time for them to come to a decision about this, about 4 months, but when they did, WOW! He now has lifelong cover for his therapy. From that day on, he has seen a steady stream of specialist therapists, all paid for by the state. This apparently will persist until the day he dies, or some government kills our health system.
He has come an incredibly long way since then. A number of interventions have broken him out of plateaus that he was hitting in all levels of child development.
We actually went with private obstetricians for him, and a private pediatrician. But when the shit hit the fan, and he was having seizures in his bassinet, the public system took over almost 100%. I have no bitterness on the private specialists over this, nor do I apportion any blame on them for his 'accident'. They did everything they could to help out, going well beyond what had been paid for, and even waived some of their bill, but the final point was that they couldn't do very much by comparison with the incredible resources of the state.
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Basically American healthcare fixes up rich people better than most and older people are richer than young people.
And even if you're richer than God -- and have insurance to match -- that won't stop your insurance company trying to finger fuck you.
In February 2001, King filed a lawsuit against his insurance company, Commercial Union York Insurance, stemming from his accident two years earlier. The insurance company had paid him $450,000 -- Commercial Union stated that amount was the limit of his policy -- while Steve sued for the full value of his $10 million umbrella policy to cover his medical bills and lost income.
[...] In the end, the two sides settled the lawsuit when Steve suggested that the insurance company donate $750,000 to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, where he'd spent three weeks recovering after the accident, and the company agreed.
(Source: Lisa Rogan, Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, pg 216)
Now, you could argue -- and people did -- that King was just being a greedy fucker and a litigious celebutard with an inflamed sense of entitlement. But I wonder how many other people in every bit as bad a state as King was after he got ran down -- and required expensive multiple surgery and around the clock medical attention for months afterwards -- get dicked around the same way. And aren't anywhere near King's ability to do without the pay out from the insurance company.
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The health rort that exists in NZ isn't from the Physios it's from the Specialists & Doctors who work in the Public and Private sectors doing the same job and adjusting their time tables to maximise income.
If you work for Company X doing Job A you can't work for Company Y and do job A. It's a clear conflict.
If John Key wants to get at the wealthy rorting the tax trough, set a clear example.
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If you work for Company X doing Job A you can't work for Company Y and do job A. It's a clear conflict.
I think Russell would call that earning a living. :)
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I think Russell would call that earning a living. :)
Heh.
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I think Russell would call that earning a living. :)
I also don't think preventing specialists from earning good money is a wise way to go about preventing the flood overseas of experienced medical staff. A necessary evil, perhaps?
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A ban on use of hands-free cell-phones while driving would be about as enforceable as a ban on thinking of sex while driving.
Actually, I think his point is that that makes banning the use of non-handsfree headsets tokenism, but tokenism that looks good.
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