Obama

[enthusiasmcurbed]

Am watching the programme on BBC2 about his fight for health care. I don't understand why the Americans don't like this. Believing in free care at the point of access, I don't get why Americans think this is a bad idea. And why it is so Socialist. Can anyone shed some light?

Does anyone know, what happens to insurance if you have been diagnosed with a disease since first taking out the insurance? Is it like here where your premiums go through the roof and some illnesses make you uninsurable?

The Affordable Care Act AKA Obamacare. Your premiums cannot go up because you have an illness. When I applied for insurance last December the questions were:
What is your name
How old are you
Do you smoke
In which state do you live

That's all they're allowed to ask when calculating your premium. They aren't allowed to refuse to sell insurance to you and they aren't allowed to put the premium up because you're ill.

Thank you lertgush, that's something that I have often wondered about

Premiums go up because you are ill, or you won't get one, or treatment if its really expensive and you can't afford it.

The NHS stopping drug Lords since 1945..

I'm watching this too, what struck me was the men basically saying why should we listen to the nuns? Sexist pricks

Premiums go up because you are ill, or you won't get one, or treatment if its really expensive and you can't afford it.

I agree that treatment can be very expensive. But your first two statements are wrong since the ACA was passed.

OMG, Sarah Palin is now spouting off. How do the Americans give her any credence?

Yes, I mean visit Canada for healthcare.

It's really, really easy for the switch to flip and for people to start saying 'why should I pay for other people who smoke, eat too much, drink too much, shag too much, have 4x4 kids, have kids with their cousins, don't pay into the system because they are scum [insert further bigoted insult here]'

I think it's believable to say that we have the NHS here because there was a terrible experience in which everyone in a single society suffered together and realised that all of humanity who lived in the same country were their brothers and sisters. If we were told that the NHS was about to become the EUHS, which would be much more like the size of a national American health service, we might find that a lot of us weren't quite so fond of socialised medicine after all - see the Brexit threads.

madamginger, exactley. Christian when it suits them.

And sexist anytime.

It showed a clip of a woman saying basically "why should I pay for health care for other people that just aren't working hard enough" to me that sums up their whole attitude. (Obviously not every single American) It seems to be a country completely lacking in social empathy. Everyone just looking out for themselves. As long as I'm OK, I don't care how many people are dying!

Sorry I should have said since ACA was passed.

I lived in America and had a friend die there in the 1990s who was denied treatment cause her insurance wouldn't pay out.

The ACA has made a lot of difference. Well done Obama!

It is madness but that's the way they do things.

The US system actually produces very poor results for the amount of money spent. As a proportion of GDP it is way more than we or the rest of Europe spend.

A lot of that is wasted money on unnecessary tests and check ups. The for profit insurance system encourages over medicalisation.

People think is bad that they have to go through a GP to get a referral and it's good to go straight to a specialist but it's very wasteful. Loads of problems don't need a specialist or a lot of expensive tests. The more tests you do the more false positives and benign problems are uncovered.

NICE is a fantastic thing. It stops the NHS from wasting money on treatments that don't work or aren't value for money but Americans think it is terrible.

Very often in healthcare more is not better. My impression of the US system is that rich people are over medicalised and get too much whilst the poor who are in more need don't have the basics ( Google the inverse care law)

The NHS is fair and it is one of the best things about being British that we care about our fellow man enough to have a universal healthcare system instead of just looking out for No 1.

It's a false economy anyway because if you oppress poor people you get social unrest and crime and that affects everyone

Yes- the Tory government want to privatise the NHS. The only people who will win from that are the private healthcare companies that ex Tory MPs have shares in or are in the board of.

mamdoc where is the evidence that the tories want to privatise the NHS? The party that has most privatised the NHS is the Labour party, who set it up with GP's as self-employed private service providers and then later introduced charges for dentists, opticians and prescriptions before finally saddling the NHS with large PFI contracts, taking millions over the next 30 years.
The Conservatives have introduced a couple of private service providers, have not signed long-term private contracts and have not introduced charges but supported free at the point of use.

The scary thing about the US system is over-testing. Morgan Spurlock did a programme about living on minimum wage and he was fine until a medical issue. He had gone from being a journalist to manual work, mainly digging 8 hours a day and his wrist had swelled. Any sensible person would have seen the link and not gone to the doctors, and anyone who had seen a Brisith GP would have been told to stop the manual work and wait for the swelling to go down. In the programme, he went to a hospital, had a number of scans and was told it was due to the manual labour - bill over $2,000.

I'm not sure if I understood your question, but Americans don't get free health care by crossing the border. In my local hospital there is sign up that says that Americans have to pay a roughly 700$ fee to get through the paperwork necessary to recieve treatements. In order do get free care you need to live in the country.