August 27, 2009

Awesome Inc

Category: Health — Biella @ 5:51 am

Great cartoon video on why we need universal health care.

7 Comments »

  1. I’ve been following the health care reform discussion closely, but I’m becoming skeptical that anything good will happen. I expect it will just be another massive corporate give-away. More profits for the insurance companies when everyone *has* to buy insurance for them, more money for proprietary IT systems that suck, etc.

    A great article with a FOSS angle is:
    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0907.longman.html

    and then shed a tear:
    http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/rethinking-healthcare/va-scandal-gives-proprietary-software-a-bad-name/337/

    Comment by Joseph Reagle — August 27, 2009 @ 7:35 am

  2. In Chile (where I’m from), there is both public and private health insurance and care. Guess which one can actually pay for good medical attention. I’m not sure if it is just an implementation problem, but that is how it works here. So government-run health insurance is not really a solution per se, but needs more to actually work.

    Comment by Felipe Sateler — August 27, 2009 @ 10:50 am

  3. It is certainly not perfect everywhere and in fact the services can be uneven. My sister who lives in PR has public insurance. For some things it sucks. For others, it kicks the ass of any private insurance. It covers all her meds for example which = 800 a month. It also has covered various therapies which would have been prohibitive.

    But she had so so so much trouble getting an appointment with an ENT as well.

    My mom who has alzheimers has the government run medicare. We would be bankrupt without it, literally.

    Again I am sure it can be improved in Chile but I still think we must explore this option in the US.

    Comment by Biella — August 27, 2009 @ 11:06 am

  4. Most 1st world nation have a system that is not like our and folks in those countries are not dying by the millions, the elderly are not being off-ed by death squads, live longer than Americans and have better infant mortality rates. And they don’t have to worry about medical bankruptcy or have Aunt Molly deciding whither to buy her pills or have cat food for dinner. I’d rather start from that kind of system and improve it than start with the current US system and reform it with the ‘help’ of the Big health and phrama.

    Comment by Kevin Mark — August 27, 2009 @ 2:53 pm

  5. [...] Interprete » Awesome Inc gabriellacoleman.org/blog/?p=1754 – view page – cached [...]

    Pingback by Twitter Trackbacks for Interprete » Awesome Inc [gabriellacoleman.org] on Topsy.com — August 28, 2009 @ 4:28 pm

  6. Hi,

    I haven’t really been following the debate about healthcare in America, but I know that some people used the British NHS as an example of how terrible it would be. Well I’m British and here’s my experience.

    Lou, my pregnant wife, went into labour 38 weeks into her pregnancy. It took 42 hours from the first contraction until she gave birth. We waited 23 hours before we went to the hospital. While we were in the hospital We saw 3 midwives (they change shift every 12 hours or so), and used 2 delivery rooms (the first was for a natural birth, the second, had lots of machines suitable for a more complicated birth). Throughout the 19 hours my wife was given an unlimited supply of entonox (laughing gas), a syntocinon drip (to induce the birth) for 6 hours, was seen by one junior doctor, a consultant, an anaesthetist, a senior doctor, and many others whose qualifications I was not aware of. When it was decided that a forceps birth was the right thing to do, she was moved immediately to theatre, given local anaesthetic to numb the pain and then had a forceps delivery (a skilled procedure that requires a trained person to carry out). She was then stitched up and we were moved to a quiet area to say hello to our newborn baby girl – Sophie.

    Lou was then moved to a room on her own in the hospital for her and baby Sophie to recover. Apparently it’s fairly standard for new mothers to stay in hospital until they’ve given the baby 2 good feeds. While they were there, the nurses checked up on them regularly making sure that nothing was wrong – measuring heart rate, checking for jaundice etc..

    The following day we were told by a Paediatrician that baby Sophie was showing signs of Down Syndrome. As you can guess, this left us pretty devastated. To be honest, I didn’t really know much about DS apart from people with it, generally look a bit funny and are a bit “slow”. However, the hospital knew that there are a number of health risks with DS so checks were made every 2-3 hours to make sure that Sophie had no heart problems and was feeding well. They checked her hearing and put her in an incubator to keep her warm. She became jaundiced, so they also put here under a UV light. They took a blood sample and sent it off to the lab for the diagnosis to be confirmed. We should get the results back in 2 days. I can’t begin to imagine how much all this healthcare would cost if there had been no NHS.

    I’m afraid I’m still a bit emotional about the whole thing, but I’ve never been more grateful for the NHS. While it’s been a very stressful and emotional few days, I suspect that if the same had happened in America, and I hadn’t had medical insurance, then I would have gone insane by now.

    What I also find strange is that it looks like the Republicans are opposed to universal healthcare. My (obviously incorrect) view of American politics was that the Republicans try Christian America (Pro Life etc..). Now consider this situation, I don’t have/can’t afford health insurance. During my wife’s pregnancy, I could have taken a test to see if the baby had DS. If I have no health insurance then taking this test would make complete sense. If the baby was DS then we would abort it (this is hypothetical Lou and I would never ever abort our baby). Surely, if you’re pro-life, you should be 100% pro universal healthcare.

    I’m probably preaching to the converted, but after the last few days I’ve had, I wouldn’t wish anyone to be without universal healthcare.

    Comment by John — September 1, 2009 @ 5:03 pm

  7. John,

    Thanks for sharing your story. It is NOT easy to deal with illness or in this case disability on your own and pooling resources in a not-for-profit manner has so far been the best method by which to deliver care and help–and there is more than one way to arrange this a well.

    My mom has late stage alzheimers and basically we pay out of pocket for the nursing home, which is only doable because the cost of care in PR is reasonable. When and if she goes to the hospital, which she has done 4 times, Medicare has covered most everything and we would be in real trouble without it.

    I wish you, your wife and Sophie the best! It sounds like you are in good hands and again *thanks* for sharing. You make a powerful powerful case.

    Comment by Biella — September 1, 2009 @ 5:25 pm

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