Healthcare Around The World

I posted this before and it didn't get much traction.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/

I promise, if you pay for healthcare, this is worth watching.

In fact, some of the countries studied other systems and put together the best parts of a lot of different healthcare programs.

This is the part that scares me about the proposals in the US. It's not about Healthcare as a big picture. It's about Health Insurance for everyone, let the system sort itself out.

I'm sorry, but it's not going to work and if you watch this program, you will start to understand why I say that. We need an overhaul of the hospital system, the medical provider system, the insurance system and the medical billing system.

And we need to do it without lobbyists from any of these groups trying to get what's best for them. Of course, that will never happen.

I couldn't agree more. I will have to watch the show. Of course Frontline always does a decent job.

But PBS is part of the liberal media conspiracy!

There is no doubt in my mind that the entire system needs to be examined. Of course, take just about any problem that we have right now, and we are trying to solve it with band-aids instead of addressing the systemic issues.

I'll try to find some time to watch it.

I promise it's eye opening.

I stumbled onto it and was immediately sucked in.

In fact, it should be required viewing for every single congress member to watch this show. To remind them what is really ahead of them and us.

For 2009 our prescription insurance is going mail order only.
Jan 01 they are allowing only 3 refills at an over the counter pharmacy and by then you are either on their mail system or you'll be denied any insurance reduction and they will deny payment, forcing us to pay 100% of the medicine cost.

Fuckers.

Duck I am confused... your pharmacy is forcing you to go mail order?

No our medical insurance provider has always had two options
1) Purchase your medications over the counter pay your standard co-pay (our case $20 name brand $5 generic)

or

2) Purchase three months of meds for the cost of two months by mail through them (the medical / medicine insurance company)

As of 01/01/2009 the ONLY way we will be allowed (form the medical insurance company) is through the mail. The will allow you three refills over the counter in 2009 to allow you to get set up on the mail delivery system.
After your third refill the insurance company will deny the co-pay forcing you to pay 100% of the medicines cost from there on out - over the counter.

My issue is how the hell do I know that I'm not getting old medicine, or shit from Canada/Mexico - my wife has a med that needs to be kept cold - how will they guarantee us that the med was kept cold the whole transit....

I just got in to a HUGE - I mean HUGE screaming match whit our regional HR director about this, I came > < this close to calling her the "C" word over this.

Were getting screwed so the corporation can svae a buck in insurance a the cost of the employees.

Yah, our insurance plan changes every 6 months now. This latest proposal wants to do the same, mail order meds. There are the probs Duck defined, but there is also the pita of them not fitting in mailslots and you have to trek downtown to a regional post office to sign and pick them up.

Duck I believe the cold ones will have to be picked up at the post office. Feel for ya buddy.

Yup that would be brutal. My one script is very time senstive (freshness), I often wonder would I do better mail order or pharmacy (would the pharmacy have fresher or mail order because they have more turnover).

Sux that they can mandate such a thing. What if you take compounded prescriptions that need to be compounded by a pharmacist?

Compounds are a whole different animal. Since it's put together from base ingredients, it doesn't have the national prescription code. It was such a hassle to get my wife's compound from her pregnancy covered that we just said screw it and paid it ourselves.

Duck, I know you probably don't want to hear this, but I'd kill for $20 brand prescriptions. I pay that for Generics. I'd even be happy with mail order at 3 months for the price of 2. My current insurance wants full monthly price @ 3 months for mail order. We are paying over $200 a month for our prescriptions on top of the monthly insurance rates which are not cheap. All told, we are shelling out almost $500 for HMO and prescriptions. I'm glad to have something, even if the copays suck. The alternative is worse.

Frontline: Sounds like the name of a cool game or no?
I took a peek at statements of the german politician Karl Lauterbach. Lauterbach stands politically seen on the left wing of a social u would call it liberal party. Made his Dr. Sc. for Health Policy and Management and epedimitology 1992 at Harvard School of public health in Boston. Currently he is working as Professor for Health Policy and Mangement at the university of Colgne.

Here is one example of improvement he wants to put through in the future:
Physicians r getting paid half or two third of what a physician earn in the US.
Lauterbach wants to cut the number of practising physicians so there r less but with more patients.

In the last years I could see lots of documentaries that report about physicians not having enough time for adequate consultation but I also see it when I ask my family and friends, that complain about less quality because physician have less and less time for each patient.

Physicians have the same complaints. Like everywhere in our economy it can be reduced to this simple formular: Less income in the same time much more amount of work.

The only ones whose income was increasing often not regarding at all the efforts being made were....our managers.

I will read more but for now I would prefer to game, if I just could. 🙂
Big advantage u got there.🙂

About the medications send by mail - or bought over the counter - there should not exist any diferences in quality! That would be horrific. Don't u have a consumer based organisation or an independed organisation which can run random tests? I don't know ....

Saint, my issue is I have a very very good report with my pharmacist - were on a first name basis he knows me, my wife my daughter and mother and farther-n-law by sight at the pharmacy and outside "in town"

I know him, I trust him, he knows what we take and when something new is prescribed, he knows weather they will have adverse effects on us.

By mail, I have no idea who has handled the drugs, how many people have handled them, if they are new or old, or even what country they came from - there are false drugs manufactured in mexico and Canada that get prescribed here by large pharmacies and are not healthy at all.

Also the company we are forced to use - Medco has fifty or more class action law suits against t hem over the last ten years for wrongful medical practices - selling the higher priced drugs to the subscribers and pocketing the profit of kickbacks for them selves in place of returning the savings back to the subscribers.

They also purchased a large pharmaceutical manufacturer 3 years ago and are randomly switching medicine from what your physician prescribes to a medicine that they make in their own pharmaceutical brand, also keeping any profit for them selves from manufacturing and then the sale of the drugs - so called double dipping profit from manufacturing and profit from the sale then profit from the subscriber.

The human resources person at my company can't see past her fat ass to realize were getting F'd as employees so the company can save a buck while screwing us over....

I'll keep fighting this one until they tell me to S.T.F.U. if I keep making noise they'll fire me or I get some sort of compensation for them screwing us they way they are.

I'm also going to start trouble in side the employee ranks to see if anyone else is as pissed off as I am, the more we make their life miserable the greater chance we have of getting them to reconsider.

Duck wrote:I'll keep fighting this one until they tell me to S.T.F.U. if I keep making noise they'll fire me or I get some sort of compensation for them screwing us they way they are.

Wish u lots of energy and a long breath for this one, Duck.
(And did u try to use ur charms on that bit? Sometimes its the biggest weapon.-just thinking-)
Health issues have been big in Germany in the last couple of years as well and politicians that were critizising the current system were looking at neighbor countries to pick up new ideas.

One point I noticed directly in the Frontline interview with that Prof. Dr. Sc. was, that he talked so positive about Germany´s health providing system, that is harshly critizised otherwise by the "weekest" members (or better the ones speaking for them): patients with chronical probs or old folks being cared for by their "children" at home.

A.f.a. I am concerned Holland´s system is pretty fair, Switzerland and Sveden, but these r all small countries nothing to compare with the US. Giant pharmacy conglomerats r heavy weight factors when it comes to making desicions about future plans. U guys got some of the worst mfs there r. They use incredible methods to reach their goal. Pfiser is big, Proter& Gamel too. I happened to work in the purchase dep of a medium sized, but for european standards big company.

On the islands we have like almost no industry. I am able to translate and help tourists when they get sick on their vacasions working at the recepcion of a small privat medical center with 5 physicians. I am not a nurse but learning a lot! Trust is so important in that field. Good comunication and accuracy.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081...html?comments=1

The article actually sucks, but the comments are incredible. There are some very intelligent people over at Ars and I'm impressed.

Wade through them if you have time. It's amazing how much people get it.

Atomm wrote:The article actually sucks, but the comments are incredible. There are some very intelligent people over at Ars and I'm impressed.

Wade through them if you have time. It's amazing how much people get it.

Very nice differenciating comments.
For my part I can find the status quo described here in detail.
Luv that. Shows me that its inteligence which makes an issue really sexy=attractive=hot=interesting.