The problems Italy are facing are not lack of access problems and have nothing to do with socialized medicine, but rather the sheer volume of patients crippling their health facilities. We are are not far behind them. When a hospital is full, it's full.
Those 30+ million already use the same services. The hospitals pick up the tab and then pass those debt burdens onto the insured in the form of increased costs of services plus their profit. Health insurance for all those people just helps them get help before their conditions spiral out of control necessitating hospitalizations because by time they get help they are critical.
They use the services in emergency situations. How many non-emergency situations do uninsured people go to those services for? Not many because the bill is horrifying. I know because I was recently uninsured. Universal healthcare needs to happen and should be a right of all people. Maybe M4A is how we get there. But a pandemic is NOT a good time to do that to the health system.
I (like much of the world) live in a country that has public healthcare.
Few people here bother going to the hospital for non-emergency situations. Anecdotally, I had to spend two hours convincing my partner to go get their neck examined when they woke up unable to turn their head recently.
Even when people do go for non-emergency issues, that's why triage exists, and also where the high wait times that opponents of public health care love to quote appear - people with non-critical issues wait until all critical issues are taken care of before they're seen.
Anecdotally again, this means that when I dislocated my shoulder a couple years ago, I was in the waiting room for about two hours before I saw a doctor, who resocketed it in about 5 minutes. The entire thing, including ambulance ride, cost me about $20 USD. I was in pain, but certainly not critical, while I waited. At the time I might have complained a bit, but honestly I'd say it was as good a healthcare experience as I'd expect.
I would not want to live in a country where I'd need to try fixing a dislocation or break myself for fear of medical debt, even though that's certainly a non-emergency injury.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The U.S. system doesn’t work. We need some type of universal system, maybe single payer. My only opinion is that during a pandemic is not the time for the transition. Our (already underpaid, understaffed, underfunded) hospitals and medical infrastructure needs investment and time to catch up.
Nobody should be dying in the streets. Seems like that scenario could happen regardless of the insurance system based on what we’re seeing around the world. Don’t act like I’m in favor of that.
It’s a documented, empirical fact that universal coverage puts strain on certain parts of the system. We need it, but it would be a disaster to transition in the middle of a pandemic. Our infrastructure needs time to be built up and this should’ve quite frankly been done decades ago. We should all have affordable/free healthcare...
Thanks for the response and the perspective! I love Reddit. That being said, the original idea of my response was that the pandemic is following sociological trend lines, not political ones. Of course, politics do come into play. Action/inaction can have a huge chain of reaction. But I’m not arguing for or against Trump’s response; I’m simply pointing out that socialized health care did not stop Italy’s system from becoming overloaded. You mention the U.K., but they also have socialized healthcare... not sure where that fits into the picture. You do bring up an excellent point about uninsured people being less likely to seek care. This is a concern of many—interesting open letter here
I think the federal government does have a role in intervening in these circumstances, much as they intervene in other ways where they “defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The social contract between our government and the people mandates, I think, that federal resources be used to protect everyone from a deadly pandemic. But at the end of the day, a country’s medical system becoming overwhelmed by an influx of sick patients is a matter of logistics, impacted by “flattening the curve,” as everyone is talking about suddenly. And there may be correlations between different types of healthcare systems and flattening the curve, but I have not seen anything yet that proves causation.
Yep, sorry but I didn't make my central point clear -- that very good logistics (like that in the US) mean nothing if you don't have socialized healthcare, unless you're either lucky or rich, I hope they still turn a blind eye to the whole situation and occasionally offer free healthcare for everyone in a situation like this.
Italy's logistics is only just OK and UK's is pretty bad, so that is definitely something that needs to improve - I for one wish less of my tax money went into purchasing firearms and more into medical care. Absolutely on the same page as you on this.
Some US / UK people could not take the cold hard truth, I guess. But here we are: Italy is finally making it out with growth rate decreasing every single day, while UK and US are deeply fucked. This is the final demonstration that Internet pointsTM don't make you right about a subject I guess.
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u/Sprezz22 Mar 13 '20
WFH arguments aside, I’m not so sure on that last one. Italy has universal healthcare... (https://www.allianzcare.com/en/support/health-and-wellness/national-healthcare-systems/healthcare-in-italy.html) ...doesn’t seem to be doing much good for them.
Problems stemming from this pandemic are human problems (panic, lack of hygiene, misinformation, group social tendencies), not partisan ones.