dreamer_easy | (no subject)

I'm dubious about opinion pieces which paint an entire part of the political spectrum with one brush, which The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult, over at the Huffington Post, arguably does. But it's worth skipping over those exasperated opening paragraphs to the meat of the matter:

"The US is the only major industrialized country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves -- and just under 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" -- and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 percent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved."

(Emphases mine.)

(Bet you wish you hadn't got me interested in this stuff now! Sorry, guys...)

ETA: That 18,000 figure is solid - it's from the Institute of Medicine. And, as the comments folks are leaving here are making clear to me, that's just part of the picture - even if you can afford some insurance, you're still likely to be looking at huge medical bills. No wonder (and that Huff Post op-ed should have acknowledged this) there's a consensus in US politics that this is wrong and needs fixing.)

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Hell, I've even seen people *die* because of the high cost of health care. Actually, a father and son double act. Both were self-employed. Dad had no insurance, and even when he started feeling under the weather in a regular way, he would look at monthly bills and decide that going to the doctor would have to wait so things like food could be paid for instead.

When he finally went in (to the emergency room), his cancer was Stage 4. Oops.

A couple years later his son, also self-employed (and no insurance) was *trying* to look after his health, but all he could afford was going to the free charity clinic about 2 hours' round-trip drive away (this was before gas prices spiked). He and his wife, the first time he went there, reported that it was a creepy experience; they'd expected to be encountering the lower edge of society at this place (i.e., winos, meth cases, etc.), but those attending were middle class, driving OK cars, etc. . . . it was just that medical care was *so* expensive, even middle class folks without outside insurance were being driven to places like this.

Son's diagnosis was diabetes, which was oddly resistant to treatment, but the clinic was too harried and underfunded to really conduct a full battery of tests . . . until it turned out to be pancreatic cancer, not diabetes, and going metastatic by the time it was noticed (if it had been noticed earlier, there might have been treatment options). Oops.

So, within about 3 years' time, this one poor woman lost her husband and her son both, to cancers that could have been caught and significantly slowed with earlier screening.

That's *my* experience with the US health system and its current "death panels." >:(

Sorry, tl:dr, but every time this comes up, I think of two good men who shouldn't have died as soon as they did. Tends to make me type a lot . . .

For me, there's no "tl;dr" or "spam" when it comes to these personal stories. I'd rather read a dozen screenfuls of concrete evidence than even one screenful of ideological declarations.

I'm starting to realise how lucky I've been when I've visited the US over the last decade: I've bought travel insurance here in Australia for a few hundred dollars, with a deductible of... wait for it... about a hundred bucks.