prizrak
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Is Merkel president for life now?
DanRoM;n3550866 said:[...]
But Merkel is on her last term (the fourth), however this CSU revolt will play out.
prizrak;n3550913 said:Interesting. I'm all for term limits on everyone, our Congress needs that too
The highly critical report found that even doubling all federal individual and corporate income taxes would not cover the costs of Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
That was pretty cheap then, my daughter busted her eye brow open and the ER bill for sitting there for like 2 hours waiting for 4 stitches was something like 6 grand. Only had to pay the 125 co-pay but still that's an insane amount of money.calvinhobbes;n3551934 said:I came into contact with those inflated prices for treatment only once, suffice to say that I was very happy to have travel health insurance. It was something like $1100 for one relatively simple visit to an American ER... not what you'd call a bargain.
As I understand (and I could be entirely wrong) the way the German system works is that you essentially have Obamacare on steroids where the insurance companies are private but everyone has to have insurance, so they do end up having to negotiate prices.As for medication prices, IIRC the German statutory health insurers all negotiate them jointly with the pharmaceutical companies. When the news still reported on that sort of thing (i.e. before Germany's "OMG ALL THOSE BROWN PEOPLE!!!" phase), it sounded like a complicated, but worthwhile effort to me. It's not quite "single-payer" or whatever one chooses to call it, but the combined purchasing power can still be leveraged. That the usual neoliberal suspects would, of course, rather we had no statutory health insurance at all, but at least scrapping it altogether is pretty much unthinkable. It also gives us quite reliable numbers on the amount of money the statutory health insurers spend on medication, which is be helpful if they're interpreted wisely.
I don't see how that's a good thing, after all does it matter that you have health insurance when you can't see a doctor when you need to?As for shortages of doctors, the problem exists all over the world. Small wonder if you consider that studying medicine is extremely difficult, more time-consuming than most other subjects, often very expensive and once you're finished, you tend to work insane hours without making insane amounts of money. That only changes after a long time and if you're lucky. Years ago, I quit medical school at an early stage and am glad that I did because the friends with whom I'm still in contact all encountered difficult working conditions and poor pay. The finance and HR people in healthcare know that the medical
and nursing staff are motivated not just by money, but also by altruism, so they exploit that as much as possible. In Germany, med school graduates are also known to work very hard for very limited rewards and complain very little (if at all) because German medical schools are designed to weed out everyone who isn't like that. Combine all those factors and the product can only be a shortage of doctors and nurses.
It doesn't have a bargaining unit, it sets prices, with no regard for regional differences I might add. Why would one expect an expanded system to be any different.GRtak;n3551937 said:The Government already has it's own bargaining unit within the Medicare system, so I don't see why it would not have it for whatever the new, or expanded system would be.
That's wildly inaccurate, plenty of people propose all kinds of solutions, Obamacare being one of those. However one of the biggest factors in price inflation that is pricing so many people out of health care is the fact that someone else is paying for it.GRtak;n3551955 said:Healthcare is complex, and yet we lag behind with getting basic care to the most vulnerable and seem to act as if that does not matter.
Source?If you want to talk about pharmaceutical RnD, the US government pays for most of it, with the big pharma companies paying a small portion and keeping all the profits.
GRtak;n3551959 said:Why does all of Europe have healthcare when we don't? How has Canada figured it out, yet we have not?