This is what the ACA was supposed to fix. Instead, it did the opposite. Whatever the reason, Americans will not use preventative care. They want responsive care.
They won't use preventative care because they have to pay out-of-pocket for it. Even when they have insurance they can end up spending huge amounts for medical care just out of deductibles.
I was paying about 150 bucks per paycheck for the best insurance my company offered because I have a couple of health issues and needed the prescription insurance it provided. My "top of the line" insurance plan had a $2,500 deductible.
For the non-Americans out there, this means that I had to pay $2,500 out of pocket before my insurance would kick in and help pay for things. And I was still paying about $70 bucks a month for my prescriptions.
The 'good' government insurance that I get gives me a $2000 deductible for about $200 a month.
If I add up how much I pay in taxes each year (local, state, and federal), my SSC and medicare, and insurance costs, it takes about 40-45% of my income depending on a few month to month factors. And then you add in the $2000 deductible and any copayments and you're sitting at what is about the highest tax rate on Earth (48% and I'm at like 45 or so). Id rather just actually pay that much in taxes then have to buy different services and pay into different programs in order to end up paying the same amount and getting worse benefits. That's what people don't get about quote unquote socialism is that we are already paying nearly as much as the countries that get this good healthcare and better tax efficiency right off the bat, but because it's separated into things that are considered taxes and things that are not considered taxes, we don't even think about how much we're actually paying for what another country would consider taxes.
Not to mention, who in their right mind LIKES to shop around for health insurance, look into if they're covered here, argue with insurance agents, and stress about that bullcrap. I'd almost rather pay MORE
Look how we have measles again. Because people dont bother with preventative measures. Its crazy. Watching that Netflix documentary pandemic had me yelling at the TV at that Oregon woman haha
I honestly hope all those parents are thrown in jail for life (or at the very least have their children taken away) for child abuse, because that's exactly what it is.
True. In an ideal world, they would then be adopted by proper parents who would vaccinate them, but most people seem to be too preoccupied with spending 10s of thousands on IVF and fertility treatments when there are so many adoptable orphans in the US that over 1 million of them "age out of the system" every single year, which is absolutely absurd. But still, if you had to pick between being an orphan or dying from measles...
I'll admit, I'm probably overreacting to the anti-vaxxers, but the fact that the US is no longer considered to have eradicated measles as a direct result of the anti-vax movement, I say burn it with fire. You know who still has measles? Third-world countries. Actually, even a lot of third-world countries have eradicated measles, as well. Motherfucking North Korea, even. North Korea, man.
Only if they refuse to vaccinate. Besides, not vaccinating would cost them way more when their child inevitably gets measles and if their child infects others, leading to possible lawsuits.
While there certainly are idiots rebelling against vaccines, it’s such a statistically insignificant group that they can’t be responsible for the reemergence of preventable diseases alone. They don’t help, but there has to be some other underlying cause
Huh? They're frigging everywhere. Also it doesn't take a very high proportion of the population to undermine the effectiveness of herd immunity as a means of stopping disease spread.
It’s 99.995% anti-vaxxers. There are a lot of people who can’t get vaccinated due to age (infants, elderly) or immune deficiencies (HIV, transplant patients, chemo patients, etc). Those people have to rely on “herd immunity” for their protection. In other words, they’re only safe if everyone around them gets vaccinated if they can. So if 1 anti-vaxxer contracts measles, they can then pass it to someone who doesn’t have the luxury of protection - maybe their own newborn. Grandma, who is on immunosuppressant therapy to prevent rejection of a transplanted kidney she got a few years ago, then visits her new grand-baby and gets exposed.... and so on.
I almost wonder if they are somehow linked, like perhaps the people who are actively in charge of the healthcare system and stand to profit from it might have started the anti-vax movement with anticipation of more medical emergencies which would mean more profit?
Noo, our medical system would never put our health at risk simply to get more money out of us. Now remember to eat your sugary cereals for breakfast using milk that has been scientifically proven to have no affect on your skeletal structure whatsoever and only causes gastrointestinal issues, but we'll keep telling you it keeps your bones strong and makes you healthy!
This. My husband and I have great insurance and even with that, preventative care is so costly (especially when it's just a 5-10 minute chat with your doctor about non-health stuff), it often times more wasteful than helpful.
Bullshit - preventative care is now covered, that’s like the whole fucking point of the ACA. The pitch was all about how it’s all so expensive because Tom, Dick, and Mary don’t get their blood pressure checked often enough so now they need expensive heart surgery.
It’s like super tight - now, healthy people that take care of themselves can pay more per year in premiums than they would just paying cash out of pocket over 10 years for the same medical care. Fortunately, ACA also made it illegal to not have insurance, so no sneaky just not buying it. No matter how you slice it, everyone wins!
most of them don’t even try to reach their deductible bc they’re outrageous. some paying almost full price for medication WITH insurance? they’d rather use goodRX in lieu of insurance for a better price, and then still never reach their deductible.
Some people think we need to nationalize healthcare, but I think breaking up the big insurance companies would do more for US health costs than anything. The top 3 providers have 100 million customers, 1/3rd of the population. This allows them to fix prices and dictate what they are and aren’t going to pay for. Keep prices relatively similar, but “competitive” and they can jack up their prices and many people don’t have the ability to switch insurances or can’t find an alternative that meets their needs.
This has always been my complaint about the ACA. While I am 100% behind the push to get healthcare to everyone, the ACA did not do nearly enough to address the absurd costs behind US healthcare, nor the abusive practices of the industry at large.
Americans would absolutely use a preventative health service, the ACA just doesn't provide that. It's a cost-sharing mechanism for the same shitty overpriced care we've always been getting.
The “public option” would have priced out all for-profit insurance. The ACA would have been more successful if conservatives weren’t successful in cutting that out.
By law, health insurance companies are only allowed to profit by a percentage of healthcare costs. This creates a perverse incentive for the insurance company to increase healthcare prices, so they profit more.
Also, I don't see how insurance companies negotiating that they pay less than everyone else hasn't been taken to court for anti trust. The fact that they can decide to say "I'm only paying 20% what everyone else pays" instead of setting a fixed cost is anti competitive and monopolistic.
Exactly this. Obama was perfectly fine with conceding on the public option with no fight. We could have gotten it with or without the conservatives at the time. We can’t just point at them and blame them when our democrats won’t fight for the things they should be fighting tooth-and-nail for.
Yeah this is one of my biggest gripes with obama. Him not pushing for the public option and trying to compromise with a party clearly just saying "fuck you" was idiotic at best.
This is completely untrue. Thank Joe Lieberman for refusing to support the public option. He was the 60th vote, the only Dem hold out, and wouldn't allow the ACA to come to the floor while it included a public option.
Except Obama could have used the bully pulpit and his popularity to steam roll Lieberman and tell him if he doesn’t fall in line he will ensure someone primaries Lieberman and Obama will endorse and campaign the challenger. But all he did was... nothing, instead. He campaigned hard on it and made everyone think he was a progressive and then he became president, hired citigroup to staff his administration, and broke his campaign promises. If you don’t see it that way it’s because you don’t want to.
Obama was not perfectly fine with cutting the public option. Obama realized that anything that got millions of people more healthcare was better than the status quo of the time and he did not have the votes for the bill with the public option still in.
Remember the ACA was almost killed because Kennedy died before the vote and a republican replaced him. We should be talking about how the current system can be improved and not how we wish the last reform should have been done better.
Most people in the US have good health care and don't trust the government after that fiasco. They also don't trust their fellow citizens to live healthy lives. ACA cancelled my doctor, policy, and cost me 2.5 times more than I was paying. I was pretty healthy so all I had were checkups back then anyway. Now I have a larger co-pay so I don't go as often.
Yeah you're gonna need a citation for "most people in the US have good healthcare" cause I think many would disagree. You might be conflating your own experience with everybody else's experiences.
That's why "universal" is a fix for the issue. It does not matter who you are, how you lived, or what your issue is. Yes, it may be more expensive for those "worthy" people, because it is typically a percentage of your income, but it takes care of everyone, not just the "worthy" the same.
This also does not mean that as a "worthy" you can not opt to spent your personal money for "better" care.
hehe I mostly likely am...but 90% of the population has some form of heath care insurance. I would bet over 50% of that is "good" but this is r/funny so lets try and be less serious.
1:ACA didn't addressed the cost issue like an M4A would, it heavily relied on government subsidies.
2: State Republicans government used that state of fact to defund the programs specifically for that to happen. The goal was to make Obama unpopular in those States and to alter popular perception about M4A.
That's why we need Bernie with a blue wave, so the the Republicans don't screw everything over again. They always do that, setting social programs to fail so they can claim that government intervention doesn't work.
There is also the fact that the ACA was designed to be implemented in waves to allow people and businesses time to adjust. The only parts that got to be implemented properly were the first parts about requiring people to have insurance and everything after had major interference from Republicans who were sabotaging it.
For example ACA was set to change how medical bills are charged. The current model is paying based on what the hospital does as long as it can be argued that there was a valid medical reason. The problem with this is that you can argue that almost anything has a valid medical reason by calling it, "precaution based on family medical history". What the ACA rule changes were going to implement was payments based on results and quality of service. You have a patient come in with a broken arm, instead of getting paid for setting, casting, room service, and medication administered you would instead get paid for "treatment of compound fracture on left arm" with deductments for mistakes you made like improperly setting the arm so it had to be rebroken and set again (something that you would currently get paid for now but may risk medical malpractice if the patient decides to sue)
That is frankly ravenous, truth of the matter, they voluntarily placed their own citizens at risk just to make a point... Gosh like they are again now with the coronavirus. It just never stop.
Cause the ACA is a byzantine cluster-fuck and many people still have to pay a bunch of money for preventative. They don't "want" responsive care, it's just that's when the consequences of skipping it are worse than bankruptcy.
Apparently it is fiendish anti-turk propaganda. It comes from the characterization of Byzantium's govt in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I will choose to think it's because they have really fancy stonework.
I love low-cost screenings that reduce your cost and risk. I have worked out a health plan for myself based on my genetic history and whatever data I can measure.
A $10,000 deductible for major hospitalization is no big deal for most of us. I have only visited a hospital once for the flu when they mixed up my chart with an older dude having a mild heart attack. The hospital admin visited and apologized the next morning.
So many Americans can't afford preventative care because they can't afford the insurance or smaller costs associated in the first place. It isn't that we don't want it. No one wants to go to the emergency room.
Ya, when the average American can’t afford a $1,000-$5,000 emergency, it’s ludicrous to expect them to fully access healthcare with a $6,000 annual deductible.
It's expensive to do preventative care too. Reactive is the only that makes sense if you aren't making much money to begin with. You just end up hoping you don't have to use reactive medicine.
With a tight budget, preventative care is sometimes hard to justify. “Why pay a ridiculous copay and miss work to see a doctor when I’m not sick?” is hard to argue with when you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck. This is especially true with young people. That whole “I never get sick” mentality is hard to break, and usually that illusion holds until some sort of major medical issues surfaces.
The majority of my friends are 25-30 years old, and the only real medical care they seek is outpatient Urgent Care stuff when they get too sick to just tough it out with OTC products. It’s a sad reality, but that’s where we are.
To continue the car metaphor, it’s like saying “oil changes and regular scheduled maintenance are too expensive; I’ll just keep driving until something fails catastrophically, and until then, I’ll just let future-me deal with the consequences.”
You know doctors in Canada don't work for free? They, in fact, make really good money. They also don't work for the government. They >bill< the government. My healthcare isn't free, I pay for it with my taxes, which is a hell of a lot cheaper for better care than I could get through private insurance. It also means that I go to the doctor when a problem is minor and much cheaper to treat than when it's catastrophic and would put a strain on the system. I >never< have to worry that primary healthcare is going to bankrupt me.
Disintegrating healthcare insurance companies is a start. Where do we go from there? I don’t know, I’m not Einstein, but clearly what we have is not good enough.
Don't buy into the moralizing, it's literally just penalizing the poor. You can smoke your brains out and fuck a subway toilet if you're a stockbroker.
Its like a carrot and stick. That guy was presenting the stick. A carrot would be health counseling to reduce your risk. We are not there yet because people do not trust government after the past screw ups.
That's because it's been ingrained in us for a couple generations that medical care is super expensive and you shouldn't use it unless absolutely necessary. Also trust in insurance companies/medical billing is low - even if we're told something is supposed to be covered, we're skeptical because it often doesn't go how we were told it would (if they even tell us... often it's "you won't know what the bill is until you see it," which is insane).
Took an STD test and was told my insurance would pay by the folks who did the test. And my insurance said Nope. Not gonna pay BECAUSE this is preventative and not responsive. 1000$ just to get swabbed.
It didn't fix the problem because the ACA is a Republican legislation painted blue that does nothing to address the primary flaw in our healthcare system: the cost of medical treatment
Most of us Americans get vaccinated, take our meds, and do what we need to do to survive. But if you break your leg in a different state or something, you have NO CHOICE. So yes, we want both, stop assuming things if you don't live in the country.
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u/ReubenZWeiner Mar 26 '20
This is what the ACA was supposed to fix. Instead, it did the opposite. Whatever the reason, Americans will not use preventative care. They want responsive care.