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About that "World's Best Healthcare System" the U.S. is supposed to have...

It cost four or five bucks to see a doctor then. Today the copayment is 35 bucks.

In the early 60s, for $1.25, a kid could take a bus RT from Upper Darby to Connie Mack Stadium and get a downstairs seat to Phillies game.

A MCD's burger was $0.15. Fries were $0.15 and shake was about $030 or $0.35.

Your 60s analogies are total BS.

Also in 1962 in many states, doctors didn't have treat black people if they didn't want to. Some states even barred black people from being treated where white people were. Want to go back to that too?
 
Just received notice of another 20% increase in health insurance premium. Thanks Obama.

The Community Organizer can suck my dick. The employer-side premium on our "non-compliant" HDHP plan (that everybody loved before the ACA shitshow sent it into a tailspin) went up 9.8% if we want to keep it another year. We can switch into a compliant plan, which drops the employer-side premium in theory, but it doubles the damn out-of-pocket for the employees, and pushes it up over their maximum allowed HSA contribution, so not only are they paying more, but they have to do so with after-tax dollars. So if I then try to be nice and gross up their pay by the amount to keep the effect of their out-of-pocket consistent with what it was under the non-compliant plan, then the net effect is that the employer-side premium that I am paying goes up 30%. For essentially the same damn coverage. Fuck you, you unqualified hack.
 
RJ, If the government had almost completely taken over fast food, you would now have to have insurance for a plain, tiny McD hamburger with only ketchup on it and the copay would be $1.10. Do you think doctors in NC refused to treat black people in the 1960's? Your 60's analogies are total BS.
 
In the early 60s (which is what I stated), they absolutely did in many southern staters.

I didn't specify NC did I?

Keep on trying to put words in my mouth.
 
Well then it is a good thing that someone forces racist doctors now to treat black people. I know I want someone to force a doctor who thinks I am subhuman to treat me.
 
RJ, If the government had almost completely taken over fast food, you would now have to have insurance for a plain, tiny McD hamburger with only ketchup on it

Somehow the rest of the world has figured out to do it, and do it with all the bells and whistles. If America is so exceptional, why can't we?
 
It cost four or five bucks to see a doctor then. Today the copayment is 35 bucks.
You got to be trolling with this dumb shit. Bread used to cost a nickel - too much government intervention in the bread market?
 
You got to be trolling with this dumb shit. Bread used to cost a nickel - too much government intervention in the bread market?

Hell, when we were at Wake the most expensive pot was $250 a pound or $25 an ounce and that only happened once. Most of the time is was $15/ounce. According to the ads in weekly papers pot seems to cost about $40-55 for 1/8 of an ounce. That's $320-440/ounce.
 
Health care is much more expensive relative to everything else than it was before wholesale government intervention, handjob.
 
Hell, when we were at Wake the most expensive pot was $250 a pound or $25 an ounce and that only happened once. Most of the time is was $15/ounce. According to the ads in weekly papers pot seems to cost about $40-55 for 1/8 of an ounce. That's $320-440/ounce.

More government intervention.
 
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/jan/20/was-early-1960s-golden-age-health-care/

"In all, slightly more than half of Americans 65 and older had health insurance at the end of 1962. That works out to 64 percent of couples, 49 percent of un-married women and 37 percent of un-married men.

"And what they had was terrible insurance -- it didn’t do much to cover them," said
Dorothy Pechman Rice, a retired professor at the University of California at San Francisco who served as director of the National Center for Health Statistics from 1976 to 1982."

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005148.html

Add to this life expectancy in 1960 was 69.7 years versus 78.7 years. That's nearly a decade of life during which people have their highest expenses.

But talking in nonsensical, non-factual bumper stickers.
 
Fewer people had government loans for college, too. College was much less expensive then. Now you have to have a government loan to go to college and you have to have "insurance" to allow you to pay just as much in copays now as you would have in total payment for health care then.
 
Health care is much more expensive relative to everything else than it was before wholesale government intervention, handjob.

You are speaking specifically of the United States only, right? Because health care is less expensive relative to everything else than it was before central control in most of the rest of the world. Is it possible we've just done a shitty half assed job?
 
You are speaking specifically of the United States only, right? Because health care is less expensive relative to everything else than it was before central control in most of the rest of the world. Is it possible we've just done a shitty half assed job?

The difference our system and theirs is that we have accepted a middleman business structure. Our middlemen add nothing but costs to medical outcomes. We also don't effectively negotiate prices for services, medications or equipment.
 
The difference our system and theirs is that we have accepted a middleman business structure. Our middlemen add nothing but costs to medical outcomes. We also don't effectively negotiate prices for services, medications or equipment.

That's not completely true - Germany, Austria and other Central European systems have mixed public/private insurance systems. It's very possible to make it work - we've just decided ours can never work without ever even trying, and then destroyed it as much as possible ... with the obvious disastrous results.

The USA has never committed to truly trying to make health care work in any coherent fashion (example - the unbelievably mish mash of ideas that is the ACA). Never once, in any form.
 
The system that provides basic needs while allowing people to pay for more if they want it would work here much better than in other places due to our infrastructure.
 
You are speaking specifically of the United States only, right? Because health care is less expensive relative to everything else than it was before central control in most of the rest of the world. Is it possible we've just done a shitty half assed job?

Yes. Yes it is.
 
Happened upon this fun little article in the archives of The Economist.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/health-reform

why would anyone think that a system in which marketing plays such a large role is likely to be more effective, to lead to better treatment, than the kind of process of expert review that governs grant awards at NIH or publishing decisions at peer-reviewed journals? Why do we think that a system in which ads for Claritin are all over the subways will generate better overall health results than one where a national review board determines whether Claritin delivers treatment outcomes for some populations sufficiently superior to justify its added expense over similar generics? What do we expect from a system in which, as ProPublica reports today, body imaging companies hire telemarketers to sell random people CT scans over the phone?
 
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