News   Mar 28, 2024
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Universal Health Care - Still Not Possible in US

May i ask where in the North-East?

I know MRI has made it to North Bay and Pembroke.

Of course there are a host of other services that have not, and still a bit open space between those 2, or going north.
Between North Bay and Timmins

I can’t recall if the MRI was in North Bay. We left about 10 years ago. I was on the local committee to purchase a CT scan which helped a lot in terms of travel. Before it was purchased, an elderly relative had to be taken by ambulance to North Bay for diagnostic tests, which was exhausting for her.

As for those hearing aids, that pricing is in line with what my husband pays. If you meet certain income criteria, you can apply for additional rebates. And you can claim the cost on your income tax, so that takes a bit of the sting off.
 
Temiskaming, I'm assuming.

That being the only place between N-Bay and Timmins that has CT, I think.

Timmins also has MRI now.
 
Not really, almost any emergency event is covered.

https://www.ontario.ca/page/ohip-coverage-across-canada#section-1

What’s covered elsewhere in Canada
When you show your valid Ontario health card in another Canadian province or territory, you will be covered for some of the same services you’re covered for in Ontario including:
  • physician services (e.g. visit to a walk-in clinic)
  • services provided in a public hospital (e.g. emergency, diagnostic, laboratory)
Any service or treatment you receive in another Canadian province or territory must be medically necessary for it to be covered by OHIP.

What’s not covered elsewhere in Canada
Services that are not covered by OHIP in another Canadian province or territory include:
  • services not covered in Ontario (e.g. cosmetic surgery)
  • ambulance services (including transport and paramedic)
  • prescription drugs and other drugs given outside a hospital
  • home-care services
  • fees charged by private hospitals or facilities
  • diagnostic or laboratory services outside of a public hospital
  • long-term care or residential services
  • assistive devices (e.g. prosthetics)
We recommend that you buy private health insurance before leaving Ontario to cover any uninsured services you may need.

Just saw a story tonight out of Sudbury about a lady who had a heart attack while vacationing in Nova Scotia a couple of years ago. OHIP has refused to pay a $19K bill for ambulance (assuming air) they got from Nova Scotia and that province has sent it to a collections company. I have to believe supplemental coverage for travel within Canada would be pretty cheap insurance to get.
 
Just saw a story tonight out of Sudbury about a lady who had a heart attack while vacationing in Nova Scotia a couple of years ago. OHIP has refused to pay a $19K bill for ambulance (assuming air) they got from Nova Scotia and that province has sent it to a collections company. I have to believe supplemental coverage for travel within Canada would be pretty cheap insurance to get.

A lot of those supplemental travel insurance have "pre-existing conditions" clauses in them, where if you answer poorly, you can be in trouble.

you-have-chosen-poorly.jpg

From link.
 
A lot of those supplemental travel insurance have "pre-existing conditions" clauses in them, where if you answer poorly, you can be in trouble.

you-have-chosen-poorly.jpg

From link.

Oh, for certain. Many investigative reports cite that the opening gambit of many carriers is 'no' then you have to dance from there. The link was offered as a cautionary tale to the belief that travel within Canada is seamless and without out-of-pocket implications.
 
The extraordinary danger of being pregnant and uninsured in Texas

The state’s system for helping the uninsured thwarts women at every turn and encourages subpar care.

From link.

Rosa Diaz was no stranger to hunger and stress and a throbbing pain in the gut that was usually nothing serious — gastritis, she had been told, or lactose intolerance. When she became ill on the evening of January 6, 2015, she figured it was the hot chocolate she’d been drinking with her family to celebrate El Día de Los Reyes. It was made with milk, but she finished it anyway, savoring every drop.

In the middle of the night, her oldest daughter, Diana, found her on the couch, clutching her belly and moaning. Diana half-carried her to the bathroom, offering her some Alka-Seltzer and a sip of Gatorade to wash the antacid down. Rosa started to shiver and cry. “Let me drive you to the emergency room,” Diana urged. “No, I don’t have insurance,” Rosa protested. “I just want to go to sleep. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Rosa, a 43-year-old Mexican immigrant who became a US citizen in the 1990s, rarely saw doctors. She was employed through temp agencies, mostly working in factories and cleaning schools — jobs that didn’t offer insurance or pay enough to let her afford her own policy. Without realizing it, she’d become pregnant, and the fertilized egg had attached itself to her fallopian tube, instead of her uterus. The condition, an ectopic pregnancy, is extremely dangerous if not treated immediately.

Diana tucked a blanket around her mother and sat with her for a while, then went back to bed. Around 3 am, she heard her mother scream. Rosa’s fallopian tube had exploded, and three liters of blood — almost two-thirds of her total volume — was gushing into her abdomen. By the time paramedics delivered her to the Baylor University Medical Center emergency room in Dallas, her heart had stopped.

When Diana thinks back on the night her mother died, and what was most on her mind, she still gets angry — “because instead of wanting to feel better, she was more worried about the cost.”

From 2012 through 2015, at least 382 pregnant women and new mothers died in Texas from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, according to the most recent data available from the Department of State Health Services; since then, hundreds more have likely perished. While their cases reflect the problems that contribute to maternal mortality across the United States — gross medical errors, deeply entrenched racism, structural deficiencies in how care is delivered — another Texas-size factor often plays a significant role: the state’s vast, and growing, problem with health insurance access.

About one in six Texans — just over 5 million people — had no health insurance last year. That’s almost a sixth of all uninsured Americans, more than the entire population of neighboring Louisiana. After trending lower for several years, the Texas rate has been rising again — to 17.7 percent in 2018, or about twice the national average.

The numbers for women are even worse. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured women of reproductive age in the country; a third were without health coverage in 2018, according to a State Health Services survey. In some counties, mainly along the Mexico border, that estimate approaches 40 percent.

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Public health experts have long warned that such gaps can have profound consequences for women’s health across their lifespans and are a critical factor in why the US has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the developed world. Texas’s maternal mortality numbers have been notably troubling, even as errors in key data have complicated efforts to understand what’s going on and led skeptics, including the governor, to question whether there’s really a crisis.

Hardly anyone outside the policy world has taken a deep look at how these insurance gaps play out for women in the second-largest state in the US — at how, in the worst-case scenarios, lack of access to medical care endangers the lives of pregnant women, new mothers, and babies.

ProPublica and Vox have spent the past eight months doing just that — combing through government data and reports, medical records and research studies, and talking with scores of women, health care providers, policymakers and families of lost mothers around the state. We learned about Rosa Diaz and dozens of others, mostly women of color, by scouring medical examiner’s databases for sudden, “natural” deaths, then inspecting investigator and autopsy reports for clues about what went wrong.

The picture that emerges is of a system of staggering complexity, riddled with obstacles and cracks, that prioritizes babies over mothers, thwarts women at every turn, frustrates doctors and midwives, and incentivizes substandard care. It’s “the extreme example of a fragmented system that cares about women much more in the context of delivering a healthy baby than the mother’s health in and of itself,” said Eugene Declercq, professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health.

Most of the mothers whose cases we examined were covered by Medicaid for low-income pregnant women, a state-federal health insurance program that pays for 53 percent of the births in Texas, more than 200,000 a year, and 43 percent of all births nationwide. In Texas, the program covers OB-GYN visits, medications, testing, and nonobstetric care, from endocrinologists to eye exams.

But the application process is so cumbersome that women in the state have the latest entry to prenatal care in the country, ProPublica and Vox found. It can take months to be seen by regular providers and even longer to access specialists. This poses the greatest danger for high-risk mothers-to-be — as many women on Medicaid are, having had no medical care for significant parts of their lives. Then, roughly two months after delivery, pregnancy Medicaid comes to an end, and the safety net gives way to a cliff. For many new mothers, the result is a medical, emotional, and financial disaster.

...
 
I wonder how (or if) the coronavirus pandemic will change the conversation or favorability of universal health care stateside.

After all, the problems with employer-based health insurance are very prominently seen now, with often the most vulnerable in these times of mass layoffs the most in dire need of good health care.

This is a situation where it's clear that leaving lots of people with poor or no options for affordable health care affects everyone and the collective well-being of society (everyone needs good access to health care to test for and be cared for to stop the virus from spreading).
 
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The pandemic would be an excellent opportunity for Biden to push for free universal health care (albeit under a different name for political palatability) and have the United States join the 21st century in health care for the average person.

What is good about having the best health care in the world if over 99% of the population can't easily access it?

As I once said, it could take over a million American deaths from COVID-19 to convince over half of the American population to accept free universal health care.
 
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I'm not sure this plague will help the push for universal healthcare in the US.

That society is fundamentally dysfunctional.

The primacy of individualism even to the point of self-detriment is so profound that anything that goes against that is seen as existentially threatening to a very large part of the population.

The place is a lost cause.
 
I'm not sure this plague will help the push for universal healthcare in the US.

That society is fundamentally dysfunctional.

The primacy of individualism even to the point of self-detriment is so profound that anything that goes against that is seen as existentially threatening to a very large part of the population.

The place is a lost cause.
I think the biggest impediment by far is that both political parties have been bought and paid by the health care industry to keep the system exactly as is. Until big money is removed from politics, nothing is ever going to change.
 
Yeah, that's a fair assessment.

I overlooked that completely.
I think it'd be a combination of the two.

The society really is dysfunctional to a high degree.
 

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