Mehmet Oz, widely recognized as television’s “Dr. Oz” and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid, has sparked controversy over resurfaced remarks from a 2013 speech, where he addressed the balance between personal and governmental responsibility for the uninsured.Dr. Oz...
  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1869·
    3 days ago

    Americans have eaten at the garbage pale of ideology for so long, they genuinely believe “rights” really are God Given and self-executing. What does a “right” to health care get you without a public health care system?

    Who overrules the hospital administrators that would rather shovel you onto the curb than have the physicians in their employee extend you care? Who overrules the AMA when it caps the number of licenses to provide or schools to issue those licenses or lobbies to limit the number of medical centers capable of providing care?

    Health care has to come from somewhere. Doctors need training. Offices need equipment. X-Ray machines need electricity. Patients need a place they can go to receive care. As folks from the UK to Cuba to Gaza have discovered, if you’re denied the resources to provide the health care you have a right to, it isn’t worth much.

    • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      51·
      3 days ago

      The obvious answer is that Medicare for All would be a great place to start in the USA. If not that, then laws limiting the ridiculous profits of insurance companies and regulating payouts would be another option, combined with some kind of Medicare for the poor that is better than the current Medicaid bullshit they have available.

      Most of all, ensuring that doctors rather than insurance companies are deciding the care plan would save many lives per year.

      • AliasAKA@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        3 days ago

        Insurance companies should be forced to be nonprofits.

        Edit: I mean we should have MfA but at the least hospitals and insurance companies should be nonprofit.

        • Pacattack57@lemmy.world
          83·
          3 days ago

          That wouldn’t work because there is no regulation. It’s very easy to spend all profits on stock buybacks and say you’re now non profit

          • AliasAKA@lemmy.worldEnglish
            16·
            3 days ago

            Nonprofits are non stock issuing; since there are no shares, they can’t have any buybacks.

        • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 days ago

          Nonprofits also act like for-profits, for example giving absurd salaries to the C suite, planning luxury retreats as business trips, hiring friends as consultants and paying expensive compensation for nothing, and so on

          I saw many “cancer research” non profits that waste most of donations in bullshit and then give what’s left to actual research grants

          • AliasAKA@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            Yes this can happen, though it should be noted that a nonprofit health insurer would be regulated differently than a nonprofit research institute that isn’t responsible for providing or reimbursing care.

            There can be corruption in governments and government programs too — but still the data says they do a better job at optimizing public health than for profit environments. Not letting perfect be the enemy of good, or better, it’s pretty clear from what I can gather that non profit is better than for profit, and optimized single payer is better than both of those.

        • AtariDump@lemmy.world
          63·
          3 days ago

          …I mean we should have MfA…

          Yes, and I agree, but I don’t see how Multi factor Authentication enters into this argument…

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          23·
          3 days ago

          Most hospitals are nonprofits.

          So are several large health insurance companies, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente.

          Guess what: nonprofits deny care too. So do single-payer health care systems.

          • AliasAKA@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            I’m not suggesting it’s perfect — I’m suggesting it’s better. I’m suggesting optimizing a healthcare system around profit instead of population level health measures shouldn’t be done. I’m not suggesting that making things be non profit or single payer will magically resolve all issues, only that it will be better.

            • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              3 days ago

              OK, but you can already find health care that is not optimized around profit. Just sign up for BCBS (which is available in most places) and choose a nonprofit medical center as your PCP (which are easy to find since they greatly outnumber for-profit medical centers).

              I suspect you may find that this leads to slightly higher premiums. After all, one of the reasons UHC denies so many claims is to keep their premiums low. But in health care, you generally get what you pay for.

              • AliasAKA@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                2 days ago

                Not all BCBS plans are nonprofit actually. And most comparisons I can find for nonprofit medical facilities show lower costs. I haven’t found many studies on pure on profit health insurance vs for profit insurance, but I did find a Harvard paper which compared specifically BCBS plans that converted from non profit to for profit, and here’s an excerpt from that:

                Looping back to the theoretical models of NFP and FP health care organizations, the findings are consistent with models in which NFPs prioritize enrollment over profits (equivalently, models in which FPs prioritize profits over enrollment). While theoretically this difference in emphasis might not manifest in higher premiums or lower quality because FPs could be more efficient and find it optimal to maintain substantially the same premiums and quality as NFPs (and still reap higher profits via lower operating costs and/or medical expenses), empirically we do find there is a tradeoff: consumers face higher premiums when large NFPs convert to FP status. Although we do not directly study quality, we find no indirect evidence of quality improvements, as inferred from a model of employee healthplan choice. Moreover, we do find evidence that rivals of converting plans experienced sizeable increases in medical spending following conversion, a result that suggests FPs are likelier than NPs to engage in risk selection practices (e.g., denying or deterring enrollment of individuals with poor health or high health risk, a practice that was legal during the study period).

                Here NP is nonprofit, FP is for profit, and NFP is not for profit. Bold emphasis is mine. You can read the study here:

                https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication Files/20130370_manuscript_c83842eb-f97b-4c84-b356-c72d163dff9b.pdf

                So I would find actually the opposite of what you said, in aggregate, according to this study. Secondly, I still argue for expanded Medicaid and a public option / single payer. I’ve worked with large population datasets from US and internationally — invariably the health outcomes and monitoring, quality of data and followup, are all better for single payer systems.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      20·
      3 days ago

      As folks from the UK to Cuba to Gaza have discovered, if you’re denied the resources to provide the health care you have a right to, it isn’t worth much.

      Fun fact: two of those three have far better outcomes than the US for profit system and the last one likely would if not for the US government supplying the bombs and political cover to destroy it.

      Basically all you’ve managed to prove is that you’re ignorant about the quality and availability of health care in other countries and will compare for profit healthcare to genocide and ethnic cleansing in order to make it look good.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        They’re right about the God given rights thing though. People really heard God given and thought that meant nobody could take them away.

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          4·
          3 days ago

          That’s why I never used that silly phrase. Rights aren’t given to you by a magical sky daddy. They’re given by and enforced by mutual agreement between people who won’t put up with their friends and neighbors being treated unfairly.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            What is happening to life expectancy in England?

            There have been two turning points in trends in life expectancy in England this century. From 2011, increases in life expectancy slowed after decades of steady improvement, prompting much debate about the causes. Then, in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic was a more significant turning point, causing a sharp fall in life expectancy, the magnitude of which has not been seen since World War II.

            The UK government is heavily captured by American finance and tech. They’re plunging down to our level quickly, despite the NHS (which they state is rapidly defunding and privatizing).

            Canada, Germany, and Japan all have the same problems. They’re gutting their golden geese.

            Developed nations did figure it out two generations ago, but have since forgotten in the fog of profit chasing and growth for the sake of Big Number Go Up.