A friend of the blog emails:

Like Justine Bateman, I was thinking that I would see a flood of posts declaring that it wasn’t a host of other issues, but that it was the guns. Nope. Didn’t see a single post.

Saw a few people say no one deserves this, not even an insurance CEO with a lot of “but he’s killing people every day” responses.

I work in healthcare. I see the occasional sad case of someone who is underinsured or uninsured. We don’t let them die. In fact, we do a lot of work for those groups of people in the hospital to try to get them to a point where they can manage outside of the hospital. If they won’t get to that point, we usually find a transitional home for them. There are the even smaller groups of people who actually have a little net worth that would lose everything if they went to a transitional place and we continue to treat them to get them stable for home with the minimal resources we can find.

Yes, there are insurers who make care for patients extremely difficult. There is one Medicare Replacement insurance that many regional facilities will not accept as payment. I don’t know too many people with employer provided insurance, however, who dislike their plans. I’m sure there are some bad plans out there. But, I would guess even in those cases, it is a small minority.

Yet, I look at other areas around the world – I have a friend who in his 40s died in a hospital in Mexico from a heart attack. He was on vacation. Maybe he would have died here, but I feel like the hospitals here would have tried harder. I think of the Chinese father in law of a friend who had a stroke and was sent home to die 3 days later in China. By all accounts of what I heard, he likely wouldn’t have died that quickly here. I think of a Parisian friend who wasn’t well. But, she didn’t fit the narrative of someone who needed medical care, so she wasn’t being treated for anything when she died of a heart attack on a plane. She probably had something that here we might have caught early enough to treat and save her life. By all appearances in these cases, it seems socialized medicine said “we aren’t going to give costly tests and treatments to this person because they don’t fit the formula for those procedures.” So, they died. Is that any different than some private insurers here? The difference is that many of us have a choice in insurers and can choose an insurer that won’t deny that care to us. And while prices are negotiated between care providers and insurance, there is probably a bit of good insurance paying a bit more than is necessary which helps cover the cost of bad insurance/underinsured/uninsured.

Americans could do more to reduce healthcare costs, like manage or avoid some chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, heart disease. But, even when Americans get a chronic illness and even when they refuse to follow any medical advice to get it under control and stay out of the hospital, regardless of income or insurance, we still treat them and value their lives. Despite their own doings and despite some insurance companies. That is truly a difference that I think distinguishes us from much of the world. It is a distinction that I think few on the Team Shooter realize. Or maybe they do realize – maybe to them, not all life has value, much like socialized medicine around the world believes.

Sort of like the parables about democracy, our justice system and the free market – our health insurance system is the worst in the world, except for all the others. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, December 20th, 2024 at 3:46 am and is filed under Crime and Punishment, Health Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.