How would a Universal Health Care system be implemented in the U.S.?

Watching the movie sicko made me want to leave America so badly. This was only amplified by last week when i was in the hospital due to bad peanut allergies and i was going into a seizer and all they really seemed to care about at the time was what my mothers social security number was for insurance purposes and i had to answer all of these questions before they could treat me.

I’m pessimistic about it. I, too, have seen Sicko. I am all for universal healthcare. But the insurance industry has a vice-like grip on this country.

I have experience on two sides of this issue: my father is a family/industrial medicine physician with two private practices, and I have lived the past 7 years with no health/dental/vision insurance. The band-aid crap insurance colleges provide is just that – crap.

I went to school to study medicine so I could take over my father’s practices (brother’s skipped out and went into business and law). But each summer when I would visit, I grew to hate HMOs, PPOs, POSs, and the pharmacuetical industry. Sitting in the coffee lounge I could hear my dad prescribing this drug and that drug, chiding patients for not following a certain lifestyle. Why are drugs the answer to every ailment? Because the drug companies have a pill for everything – most things which could be better remedied by lifestyle changes. They visit doctors and give them incentives for prescribing their drugs.

I remember having to “prioritize” people who visited the office not by their ailment, but based on what type of insurance they had. Believe me, that is painful to do. I swore this is not the way healthcare should be. It is not a business – it is a right. These are the side effects of insurance, and I consider it evil and unethical.

Now, regarding the time I had no insurance. Praise G-d I never got I’ll or had an injury. But I honestly couldnt afford it! You may ask why I wasn’t insured by my father – short story is dad married a golddigger who cut off his original family. ($&@%#). Living without insurance and knowing you can’t get a checkup or have anything happen is frightening. It sucks. Once again, why is healthcare a privilege, and not a right?

I am against Senator Clinton’s method of universal healthcare. Under her plan, every American must pay insurance or face a penalty. WTF, my reason for not having it wasn’t because I didn’t want it – it was because I couldn’t afford it.

Senator Obama’s plan is closer to reasonable, but not perfect. The cost of insurance will be lowered across the board, and it will be required (via gov’t subsidy assistance) for all children. That’s a step in the right direction. Children are our most important investment as a country, and the change, whole small, must start with them. Senator Obama’s plan will definitely kickstart a trend to phasing out insurance companies.

On another note, I lost interest in taking up my father’s practice. I believe a doctor’s profession is to know his patients and teach them good lifestyle – and prescribe drugs only for ailments that lifestyle and smartness cannot fix.

Forgive the typos please, I was attacked by a snarl-toothed kangaroo with red polka dots.

Just kidding.

(the iPhone thinks it’s smarter than me, that’s all)

Uberbatman’s experience is what makes me hate this all the more.

I am sorry you had to experience that, and I hope things get better.

you guys suck

First of all, I can’t believe they cut out the part in Sicko where Michael Moore showed the doctors who have left Cuba because even though health care is “free” the common people can’t get medicine or if they stay in a hospital, they must take their own bedding and supplies. I am sure Michael filmed that since he wants the whole truth to come out. They also didn’t show that only Doctors with families are allowed to travel out of the country because those with no ties leave the country when they see that Cuba gives out the best health care to other countries and leaves the common people with basically free nothing. Again, I am sure Michael must have been overruled in showing this as he wants the whole truth to be told.
Secondly, how would it be implemented in this country. The government would create a new bureacracy in which certain rules for procedures would be implemented,meaning, just as in Canada, people who need certain speicalized treatment woudl probably get to wait for a year or two before they got it, if they haven’t passed away. If they do make it that long, it won’t be the quality we have come to expect, but it will be “free”.
The drug and pharmaceutical companies will only research drugs that the government deems important so again, a bureaucrat will make a medical decision.
It will raise taxes on all of us, we won’t know the real costs because, just as in other countries with socialized medicine, much of the cost is hidden in bureaucratic accounting, just as Social Security is here.
All in all, we won’t get the medical treatment necesarry, but it will be “free”.

how we pay for it and take a look at the v.a. Thats what we will get just on a bigger scale and the government I doing a great job with s.s.

Just take any standard HMO and all of its problems. Multiply it by 100 and that will tell you how Universal Health Care will work here.