How do you think Unviersal Health Care would impact other areas in the US?

Such as:

the cost of car incurance

burden of civil claims for medical expences on court systems

safety standards regulated by the government.

the way child support is calculated.

the cost of elective treatments.



What kind of impact other that increased taxes would UHC have on the US?How do you think Unviersal Health Care would impact other areas in the US?PositiveHow do you think Unviersal Health Care would impact other areas in the US?actually bills would not be increased for the UHC. All the money going into all those other things you mentioned would decrease. There is more than enough money being poured into our government to cover all of this **** right now. The funding isn't making it's way back to the people. The money is going into the pockets of the rich.How do you think Unviersal Health Care would impact other areas in the US?I don't see how UHC will impact car insurance or civil claims (just as places that cap pain and suffering now do, the elderly and the working poor wouldn't be able to sue. You can't find a lawyer to take those cases now because the lawyer can't make his costs back--probably $300K to do a malpractice case. So only those with money would be able to sue for malpractice.) I don't see safety standards in general impacted, though on medical things possibly. This would theoretically remove the issue of medical expenses for kids, but I think now it's more someone has to pay for the insurance and half the deductibles/co-pays typically.



Elective treatments would depend on where they're done. If people go to surgi-centers or such, outside the government's control, prices will be affordable. If they need to use a hospital or such affected by UHC for a private surgery the costs would probably skyrocket.



Costs will go up. Be more folks on disability and welfare because as you get ill and can't get in (numbers of workers and quality within the system would drop--look at our Medicaid and Medicare systems, IHS, that's the future with UHC) you won't be able to work and won't be able to pay the bills. More bankruptcies for the same reasons. Money we get now from medical innovation will decrease in all likelihood. Stock market would take a hit on medically related things in all likelihood.



With more taxes, there will be less available for business investment, so new businesses will likely decline.



The proposed "everyone gets his own insurance policy" will soon become "we run this industry." The major insurers will still get good money--they'll charge heavily to "administer" things. Docs will be more screwed.



In the US, Medicare is going bankrupt. In 1998, Medicare premiums were $43.80 and in 2008 will be $96.40--up 120%. "Medigap" insurance is common because of the 20% co-pay required for service. Medicare HMOs are common because they reduce that burden without an extra charge in many cases. HOWEVER, many procedures which used to have no or a low co-pay NOW cost the full 20% for the HMO Medicare patient. ALSO the prescription coverage they tended to offer has been REDUCED in many cases to conform to the insane "donut hole" coverage of the feds. Doctors are leaving Medicare because of the low and slow pay AND because the crazy government wants to "balance" their Ponzi scheme on the backs of doctors.

"That dark cloud lurking over the shoulder of every Massachusetts physician is Medicare. If Congress does not act, doctors' payments from Medicare will be cut by about 5 percent annually, beginning next year through 2012, creating a financial hailstorm that would wreak havoc with already strained practices.



Cumulatively, the proposed cuts represent a 31 percent reduction in Medicare reimbursement. If the cuts are adjusted for practice-cost inflation, the American Medical Association says Medicare payment rates to physicians in 2013 would be less than half of what they were in 1991."

http://www.massmed.org/AM/Template.cfm?S…



It just does NOT work the way people have been misinformed that it does. Even folks IN those UHC countries who do NOT know what is really going on.



The NHS, the oldest system, is in Britain:

"“Staff are being laid off, and deficits are at an all time high (￡1.07bn for 2005-2006)” (Hazel Blears, Labour Party Chair and Minister Without Portfolio, labourachievements.blogspot.com/2006/08/…

In the National Review Online article, Coburn %26amp; Herzlinger state “more than 20,000 Brits would not have died from cancer in the U.S.” Just recently Alex Smallwood of the BMA (British Medical Association) was quoted in the Scotsman as saying: “’Rationing is reduction in choice. Rationing has become a necessary evil. We need to formalise rationing to prevent an unregulated, widening, postcode-lottery of care. Government no longer has a choice.’” (Moss, “NHS rationing is ‘necessary evil,’ says doctors,” 26 June 2007).



"Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.

...

As if a taboo had lifted, government statistics on the health-care system’s problems are suddenly available. In fact, government researchers have provided the best data on the doctor shortage, noting, for example, that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12 percent of that province’s population) can’t find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who’d get a doctor’s appointment.

...

...Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”



And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.



This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.



Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer."

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_ca…