Re: SCOTUS LIVEBLOG - Obamacare Mandate Survives-Part 2[W:1, 183, 386]
Explain to me how those three countries offer better care than the US.
Lots of ways. First, and most importantly, they have kept costs reasonable. So, they are able to ensure that everybody has access, and they don't need all these mechanisms to try to discourage people from seeking medical care like we do with the deductibles and whatnot. They usually have shorter wait times.
Remember the idea of a "check up"? It used to be that everybody usually went to the doctor about once a year here just to see if everything was in tip top shape. These days women still do that, but guys generally don't at least until they hit 40. Or, remember "house calls"? It used to be that if you were sick, the doctor would come to you if it would be uncomfortable for you to travel. Not anymore. Today you have people taking the bus and sitting around in a waiting room to see a doctor when they are just barely able to keep it together. I remember it used to be that you hardly had to wait to see the doctor and when you got in, he could take however much time you needed for the appointment. If you came in because of a fever, he'd also make sure to run through a bunch of simple tests of your reflexes, maybe your blood, he'd talk to you about your diet and exercise, listen to your heart and lungs, look in your throat and ears, etc. Today you show up and they're 45 minutes behind schedule. If you are there because of a fever they'll give you a kind of exasperated "why are you wasting my time with this" look, tell you to drink plenty of fluids, and shoe you out of their office within 2 minutes. People here used to have a life long relationship with their doctor. Their doctor would know a bit about them, know what health issues they were struggling with, etc. People used to talk about "trusting" their doctor. Now it's just a commodity. As often as not, health care plans now just slot you with whatever doctor happens to be free. Many people don't even have a specific doctor they go to anymore.
That decline didn't happen in other countries. They still have check ups and house calls and relationships with their doctors and appointments that are as long as they need to be.
The quality here has been getting worse and worse for decades. And it is happening slowly enough that we aren't freaking out about it. Like the frog in the slowly warming water. That is bizarre. It isn't that it is super odd that the quality kept improving in other countries. Most industries, a steady improvement is expected. We're the oddity- a country where despite charging radically more every decade than the last, the health care industry continually gives us worse care.
Not that the quality here is terrible. We're still 37th out of 196. And some of those other countries that score above us aren't really representative of the typical country in their economic bracket. Columbia and Morocco, for example, have exceptionally good health care systems for third world countries. They put a good chunk of resources in and have had particularly good luck making it all work together. They're role models for other third world countries in terms of making the most out of what they have. But, yeah, after say 25 years of slipping here for quality, we have gotten to the point where the poorest first world countries, like Greece, are almost all ahead of us, and some third world countries with exceptionally strong systems are now ahead of us.
But, for what we pay, it is terrible. We pay twice as much per person as the other first world countries. Every single person in the country should have world class health care far better than what we had 25 years ago. We are paying roughly three times as much as we did 25 years ago adjusted for inflation. The quality should be absolutely, unequivocally, head and shoulders above the quality elsewhere. But it isn't. We're getting ripped off.