what happened to doctors?

FieryTrainwreck

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ShadowKatt said:
Actually , that doesn't sound anecdotal, it sounds more like gross generalizations and veiled political attacks (especially that bit about the "Death Panels". How quaint.)
I didn't give my anecdotes. Probably because they are, in true policy creation, completely fucking meaningless next to raw statistical data. I'm sorry if that's blunt or insensitive, but that's how governments overseeing hundreds of millions of people need to function.

I really don't care about your arguement. As I said I've seen it first hand and as such I will oppose the entire "Universal Health Care" deal until I see a more viable option. We have a model right now where the poor cannot afford non-critical medical care, or we can switch to the socialized health care that tries to treat everyone and winds up treating no one. Or we can look for a third option that actually works. For now, I'll stick with what has worked.
My sister became very ill while traveling in Thailand. She was able to see a doctor almost immediately. He prescribed antibiotics, and she picked them up roughly 10 minutes later. The entire experience cost her almost nothing.

My mother was traveling with an ultimate frisbee team in Prague. One of the players badly broke his ankle during a game. They were able to see a doctor within the hour. He set the leg, attached the cast, and sent the player on his way. His bill? Under $20, and that was mostly for the pair of crutches he got to keep.

I have more.

Point is: if I had this evidence to support my own personal views, but a grip of statistical analysis showed that my experiences were aberrations, and that the far more effective and economically viable system was privatization, I'd be able to grasp that truth and move past my own limited point of view. Given the complete opposite is true, why can't you do the same?
 

FieryTrainwreck

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Fetzenfisch said:
it really sucks to be a doctor in the states. you pay a god damn way to expensive education, then work some years like a slave in hospitals with 48 hour shifts being the normal, then your income is decreasing and decreasing every year and you lose much of what is left to insure yourself for the case that something goes wrong while you try to save some poor souls life, because in the unlikely event that you lose a patient who is terminally ill *cough* his family will blame only you and try to sue millions out of your ass like its peoples second most favourite sport in the US next to being offended by everything more specific than the weather forecast.
i wouldnt want to work there for a week.

it's not only the healthcare that is broken, its education, peoples ungrateful attitude and the general society.
you would have to start the country from scratch to save it.
This is true, but that's what happens in a society where capitalism runs completely amok. They gave corporations all the rights of the individual with none of the social responsibility or conscience. It's essentially a license to enact sociopathic behavior on a grand scale with few or no consequences. People are getting run over left and right, so they fight back the only way they know how - by becoming their own "corporations" - greedy, selfish, entitled, litigious, beyond reproach, etc.

So I don't fault people for suing the pants off doctors whenever they can. That's just how this country was built, and the little guys weren't the ones who built it. They're just trying to fit in with all the greedy fucks who run the place.
 

murphy7801

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RoonMian said:
murphy7801 said:
Kysafen said:
YOU'RE ALL GOD DAMN COMMUNISTS.

COMMUNISM FAILS BECAUSE IT FAILS.
Well and fascist because Germans have a national health system.
Actually Germans have a hybrid system. We don't have one national System like the NHS. In Germany it is mandatory to be insured and the fees for your insurance are automatically taken from your paycheck. At the moment the fee is 15,5% of the income, 7,3% being payed by the employer, 8,2% being payed by the employee. That gets handled by a shitton of public insurance companies working on a non-profit basis. For people not getting a paycheck (civil servants, freelancers, artists etc.) or people with a high income demanding a premium service there are private insurances with varying services. That part of the system is much like the one in the USA but makes only about 15% of the German system.
It was joke responce to joke post hope you are aware. But that's very informative, personally I like the french health system since broke my arm on holiday and got good treatment.
 

Shraggler

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I'm all in support of a national health care system. There are two problems with this though.

1) Most people in this country don't trust the government to do anything correctly - especially with money. Think about it, we have the largest military budget in the world and we've still been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly a decade and stopped over in Iraq eight years ago. That's at the Federal/national level. States have their own budgetary "problems" - in my state alone, a freeway on-ramp proposed at $45 million and projected to take 6 months to complete ended up costing $95 million and 18 months to complete. That's another 50 million fucking dollars and a year for a fucking on-ramp. And we expect the government's going to get their act together with something as costly as healthcare?

2) We don't have a collectivist mentality in our society. A good example is the earthquake + tsunami in Japan. The news media in the States were flipping their shit because there were no reports of looting. "We could really use that kind of thinking here." You bet - a few months later Joplin got hit by a gigantic tornado and we had fake donation agencies popping up all over the place.

Similarly, there are enough people that take advantage of government systems in this country that, coupled with the above-mentioned excellent government budgetary book-keeping, may as well amount to the entire middle-class dumping the 50% of their paycheck they get to keep right off the nearest bridge.

It's sad and stupid, but people are lazy assholes, and it's ruined for the rest of us.
 

DannyJBeckett

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Kekkles said:
Let's start from the top shall we, with spending. We're at war with Iraq and Libya at the moment, Libya alone of having an estimated cost of £260m over the course of 6months. Wouldn't that be helpful if spent elsewhere? Oh and just so you know UK spent 4.5billion in Iraq. Oh yes, we're glad to go to war when our own country is still left in it's own pile of filth. They're hacking away at these "unnecessary costs" when we're still sending our troops out to Iraq. The NHS could be getting it's money but (I know the expenditure of the NHS is around 100billion before you say anything) there are other things in it's place. Before anyone goes patriotic commando, I'd like to say we should spend our money on OUR country before we bring "democracy" to others.

On the riots now: Do you know any of these people? Any of these people that have NOTHING, not because of what they haven't done but because what has been taken away? My friend, a single-mother of 3, had her job taken from her and now has to live off the government. She barely has enough money at the end of the week to feed herself, let alone her 3 kids. Her life is in shambles. Now compare that to how many other people have had their jobs taken from them and their kids that see and live the suffering and to how many kids that have nothing to do but live in gangs, not because they think they're hard, but because otherwise they'll be killed. Also there are kids that every day get pinned up against a wall by police and interrogated for something they haven't done, they're pretty sick of it.
You got yourself a group of minors that are pissed off, so they start something. A spark, then rises to a flame. Yeah sure there were people blindly jumping on the band-wagon for 'free stuff' but don't ignorantly say "Oh, they're all just chavs kicking it up because they're brainless thugs" or to which you were implying. Half the battle is getting people on your side. No matter the reason.

We need a cost effective nation, Labour were doing well until Blair fell a bit too deep into Bush's fuck-hole and thought it'd be a good idea to go to war. We need an independent country helping itself and not helping others, not spending it's money elsewhere.
Frankly, I agree with your argument about our involvement in the Middle-East being a money-drain, so that kind of kills the debate right there.

But there was no 'group of minors pissed off' in the riots at all. The riots started out as a peaceful protest against the police shooting a man dead (who was an armed drug-dealer, by the way), in the midst of the protests, things turned violent and culminated in the burning-down of dozens of businesses, community centres and homes, which then spread to other areas when people thought they could get away with it. There was no 'uprising' about it, it was sheer, mindless animalism.
 

RoonMian

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murphy7801 said:
RoonMian said:
murphy7801 said:
Kysafen said:
YOU'RE ALL GOD DAMN COMMUNISTS.

COMMUNISM FAILS BECAUSE IT FAILS.
Well and fascist because Germans have a national health system.
-snip-
It was joke responce to joke post hope you are aware. But that's very informative, personally I like the french health system since broke my arm on holiday and got good treatment.
Yeah, I know it was a joke. I just wanted to say that there is a middle ground between total communism (like in the United Soviet States of Great Britain) and total capitalism (like the one the Americans have President Nixon to thank for, as far as I know). The "fascist" way, if you will.

Macgyvercas said:
AndyFromMonday said:
That's why the USA doesn't tax its citizens
Tell that to the 20% that comes out of my paycheck and goes to the feds, city and state.
20%? TWENTY?!?

From the tone of your posting I guess that you think that that is still way too much. Let me guess: You don't know who it is your paying taxes for in the first place, right?

And let me take another guess: You don't own any mirrors, huh?
 

murphy7801

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RoonMian said:
murphy7801 said:
RoonMian said:
murphy7801 said:
Kysafen said:
YOU'RE ALL GOD DAMN COMMUNISTS.

COMMUNISM FAILS BECAUSE IT FAILS.
Well and fascist because Germans have a national health system.
-snip-
It was joke responce to joke post hope you are aware. But that's very informative, personally I like the french health system since broke my arm on holiday and got good treatment.
Yeah, I know it was a joke. I just wanted to say that there is a middle ground between total communism (like in the United Soviet States of Great Britain) and total capitalism (like the one the Americans have President Nixon to thank for, as far as I know). The "fascist" way, if you will.

Macgyvercas said:
AndyFromMonday said:
That's why the USA doesn't tax its citizens
Tell that to the 20% that comes out of my paycheck and goes to the feds, city and state.
20%? TWENTY?!?

From the tone of your posting I guess that you think that that is still way too much. Let me guess: You don't know who it is your paying taxes for in the first place, right?

And let me take another guess: You don't own any mirrors, huh?
20% sounds fair if includes all taxes and you get good public services for your money like free health care. I pay around 23% thinks that's reasonable but I live in the uk
 

Sectan

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Daystar Clarion said:
America. Land of the Free (as long as you have money).

It's ridiculous that a first world country exists without a national health system, but I suppose that's what happens when corporations have such a huge influence.
Politicians, probably having stakes in the insurance business, scare people into thinking its one step closer to big brother. THEY'RE CONTROLLING YOUR HEALTH MAN, PUTTING CHIPS IN YOUR HEADS AND TELLING YOU WHAT TO DO! At least that's what my grandmother thinks a national health system would be, but she's weird like that. She was scared for her life when she found out Obama was president.
 

Qitz

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I see no problem is a national health care system. The only real problem with it is, well, we're Americans. Americans are greedy idiots when it comes to free things.

I wouldn't want it to be completely free right off the bat because I know there are people out there who would get blood tests and MRI's because they had a bit of a head ache. I see nothing wrong with helping a citizen whose been in a car accident, broke a limb and got a cast all for free, provided it wasn't their fault, if they ran a red light and t-boned another car then I say they should pay for it themselves.

I also don't see how people can argue about how "Why should I pay for the medical problems of someone else?" when your taxes already do that. State taxes are used to pay for roads that you'll never drive on, water you'll never drink, food regulations for stuff you'll never eat, buses you'll never ride, ect...

So yeah, I'd be for a restricted health care system, at first, that gives priority to people who were injured due to no fault of their own. Birth defects, accidents, military injuries and the like should be given some leeway while someone who breaks a leg by B.A.S.E. jumping should be shit outta luck.
 

Booradlee

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Spud of Doom said:
A country that values business opportunity over the wellbeing of their own people, basically.
I know right? I personally don't know what I'd do if I didn't have Big Brother looking out for me. It's all right, everything is all right, the struggle's almost finished. I have won the victory over myself. I love Big Brother.
 

Booradlee

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Sectan said:
Daystar Clarion said:
America. Land of the Free (as long as you have money).

It's ridiculous that a first world country exists without a national health system, but I suppose that's what happens when corporations have such a huge influence.
Politicians, probably having stakes in the insurance business, scare people into thinking its one step closer to big brother. THEY'RE CONTROLLING YOUR HEALTH MAN, PUTTING CHIPS IN YOUR HEADS AND TELLING YOU WHAT TO DO! At least that's what my grandmother thinks a national health system would be, but she's weird like that. She was scared for her life when she found out Obama was president.
Actually my main problem is the politicians making money From the insurance companies. So their looking out for those companies more than for me. Did you hear of a single plan that got rid of the insurance companies?

I'm not afraid of the microchips, I'm afraid of corruption in the system and a system that controls everything. Everybody is complaining about health care for everyone, and how expensive it is. But it's always the Doctors fault, not the insurance companies fault who don't cover it.

We need more Doctors in our health care, and less Bureaucrats mucking up the system.
 

BrassButtons

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RaikuFA said:
Friv said:
RaikuFA said:
nor should it give you the right to say "i wont take care of you unless we can accept your insurance. and i wont tell you what insurance we take. trust me, you cant afford it."
I'm just going to touch on this for a moment.

Why not?

Doctors are people too, and they have to make a living. I can guarantee that right now, there are people dying who could be living if you were devoting all of your time to helping them instead of yourself. You could be in Africa helping poor villagers develop sustainable farms, or even just spending all of your time down at the soup kitchen feeding the homeless.

We have phrases like "saintly" because most people are, by nature, interested primarily in their own survival and happiness. Once you are happy and secure, then (if you're a good person), you can look to the happiness and security of strangers. Why assume that just because someone trained as a doctor, they're required to not be happy or secure?

The problem isn't with the doctors, it's with the incredibly broken system in the United States. The American health care system has the dubious distinction of being taxpayer-intensive and totally worthless at the same time. (I'm in Canada, which is significantly better but still has room for improvement).
youre telling me that its ok that a doctor can refuse to save a guy with a pipe in his lung because he has medicaid yet can accept a guy with a twisted ankle because they have blue cross?

thats kinda what i got from it so i might be wrong
I think what he's telling you is that asking doctors to see patients without an insurance that will cover the procedure is asking them to give away treatment for free (there are exceptions where the patient will pay the charge themselves, but a doctor can't count on that). If you're going to say that doctors should put the welfare of others ahead of their own personal greed, then you should be putting the welfare of others ahead of your personal greed. But most people don't do that. They don't work for free, they don't donate large sums of money to charity. Remember, if a doctor treats someone for free he is losing somewhere between $40-$80, and that's just for the office visit (meaning he came into the room and met with the patient). If there's something actually wrong with them the doctor can easily be looking at a few hundred dollars loss. The argument for why they should accept this is "people's lives are at stake." Yet we don't expect others to donate hundreds to charity, even though people's lives are at stake.

Also, a guy with a pipe in his lung won't go to a general practitioner, he'll go to an ER (or he'll go to a GP and get an ambulance ride to the ER). And they will remove the pipe no matter what. In life-or-death situations doctors treat first and ask questions later. But they have to know it is a life-or-death scenario, which I'm willing to bet was not the case with the person who was coughing blood. If the people in that office didn't see it, they wouldn't assume he was there for a life-and-death reason. They aren't ER doctors, after all--they don't DEAL with life-and-death. (That said, if they did see it and failed to call an ambulance, there should be some MAJOR ramifications for that.)
 

Rednog

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The problem with medicine today is not the doctors, at least in America, it is the corporations running the hospitals and the people who get treated and are douche-bags. I was in med school for two years before I quit, and patients are the most fickle people one can ever deal with. And this culture of suing doctors unfortunately leads to this waste of money that forced the US to have to deal with the refusal of people. People expect unrealistic things from medicine, or if a single hair gets up their arse they jump to sue. Yes there are legitimate complaints but for every legit complaint there are 3 other frivolous ones that money gets wasted on.
In healthcare where the gov't has to pay for, the doctors are fairly well shielded against this nonsense and people who try to sue end up having to face the gov't and even in they somehow win they won't be swimming in money for the rest of their lives like in the US.
 

Macgyvercas

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RoonMian said:
murphy7801 said:
RoonMian said:
murphy7801 said:
Kysafen said:
YOU'RE ALL GOD DAMN COMMUNISTS.

COMMUNISM FAILS BECAUSE IT FAILS.
Well and fascist because Germans have a national health system.
-snip-
It was joke responce to joke post hope you are aware. But that's very informative, personally I like the french health system since broke my arm on holiday and got good treatment.
Yeah, I know it was a joke. I just wanted to say that there is a middle ground between total communism (like in the United Soviet States of Great Britain) and total capitalism (like the one the Americans have President Nixon to thank for, as far as I know). The "fascist" way, if you will.

Macgyvercas said:
AndyFromMonday said:
That's why the USA doesn't tax its citizens
Tell that to the 20% that comes out of my paycheck and goes to the feds, city and state.
20%? TWENTY?!?

From the tone of your posting I guess that you think that that is still way too much. Let me guess: You don't know who it is your paying taxes for in the first place, right?

And let me take another guess: You don't own any mirrors, huh?
Oh, I'm aware of where it goes, and yes I do own mirrors (and see what you are trying to say).

What I took issue with was the statement that America doesn't tax it's citizens.
 

fix-the-spade

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thiosk said:
We've already got medicare and medicaid in america, coupled with social security, those systems are why we're broke.
Actually, America's broke because it pawned off it's heavy industry to China, used state money to buy out the failing automotive industry (George Bush did this, yet people call Obama a Socialist?!) and most importantly, it's been fighting two wars for the best part of a decade that have single handedly taken America from budget surplus to massive debt.

Clinton left America with money to spare, Bush jr left it in such a big hole that anything Obama did was doomed from the get go.

As far as health care goes, why America hasn't gotten as far as having state enforced health insurance is beyond me. Doesn't need to be fancy, just a medical emergency cover that comes out your tax bill, few bucks a month...