If everyone had access to healthcare the net benefit of treating the mental illness and other disabilities holding them back would easily cover the cost of the healthcare itself.
Piled on top of that are layers upon layers of middlemen rent-seekers. The amount of parasitic corporate bullshit that goes on behind the scenes whenever you go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription would blow most people’s minds.
The good news is, awareness is growing, and there are a few good actors in government trying to do something about it. It’s very much an uphill battle, though.
I’m just speaking from personal experience. If I was given adequate health care 20 years earlier there is no telling how different my life may have been. Instead I had to achieve impossible feats to get insurance which then made those seemingly impossible things trivial.
Its so weird living in a country where healthcare is a right, and seeing how E everyone in USA is against public healthcare until their insurance stops covering expenses.
And preventive medicine makes us live healthier for longer, making sure we can keep sustaining the system and reduce the amount of more complex and expensive care needed.
Entrepreneurs and small business would benefit tremendously. More people could follow their ideas and dreams as small business owners and entrepreneurs, and boost economic output and innovation. All are hindered by this surfdom.
I had my own business and my health insurance was crazy expensive and had a terribly high deductible. Ultimately I went back to being an employee. Then back to contracting with terrible excuse for health care. The compay I’m contracting for will lose me as soon as I land a job with good healthcare, so they’re effected too and they’re not small.
Anyone who is not for universal healthcare is anti-small business, the economy, the countries’ innovation and security in the global economy, and the people.
We have health care in Canada yet still lots of street homeless people. They aren’t getting adequate care at all, yet the cost of caring for them exceeds the average person by many times. Many of them are on a first name basis with all the paramedics and other first responders due to how often they’re taken to the emergency room.
Ok, but, I never said universal healthcare would solve homelessness. In America we have the same cost except we’ve made it illegal to be homeless and pay to keep them in prison.
Unfortunately the Conservative groups in this country want us to have a fully privatised system. They’re already working to rid the country of mentally ill people, disabled people or anyone who could be a “drain”. There’s so much rhetoric at the moment about mentally ill people or those with ADHD and Autism receiving benefits I’m actually scared, they’ve made sure that the waitlist for therapy is a year long. I was forced to go private for my therapy or wait “up to 36 months”. I was suicidal and my mum couldn’t risk us waiting, so she sold half of our land to a builder to pay for it :/
Not having preventive health care if like having a car, hear it make too many strange noises and not fixing it until it breaks and you end up on the side of the road upside down. You “didn’t spend money” in minor fixings but you end up paying a lot more.
As someone in the final stages of a masters degree in healthcare management and economics:
Almost. It doesn’t entirely cover the costs (at least from the data we have available worldwide, which is somewhat insufficient) but a focus on mental health(which always includes workers rights, women’s rights and a few more social issues that create long term health problems on a massive scale) and prophylaxis in general is FAR cheaper than what most industrial nations currently do.
We do have a few issues that are not addressed in these concepts (e.g. end of life care and costs associated with that, new types of personalised medication, accessibility in rural areas,etc.) that still make a healthcare system like that something society has to pay for…But it does improve things massively, especially the quality of life of people that are not the actual patients.
I don’t know because I’m in the US, but does universal healthcare in other countries cover autism-related therapies and care such as ABA, occupational and speech at the rates recommend by docs (our docs recommended 20+ hours/week - or roughly the cost of $100k/year)? And is that factored into the equation?
I haven’t seen the official modeling, just assumptions around the internet. But back of the napkin math suggests that appropriate autism care alone could be quite high: 1/36 of the 341,500,000 American residents have autism. Assuming 15% need care in the range of $100k, would be somewhere around $138b/year for just autism care. Does that seem in line with what you are thinking? Either way, are you able to point me to some of the modeling you have found? I’d love to learn more about how it tactically works.
But what do you base those 15% on? Might as well be 1%, or even lower. In the end its just your own intuition, based on nothing. Hell, if they were capable of answering that survey, I don’t think they’d need that much support.
Nothing, back of the napkin math for discussion purposes based on the 2 diagnosisea and doc recommendations we’ve gotten. Totally can adjust if you have a more accurate number.
I didn’t speak until I was 4 years old. Safety issues were handled by teaching me to swim, light campfires and bonfires and fireplace fires, use power tools, a little firearm safety, and how to interact with horses without getting kicked.
Mom knew I was a special kid, so she pushed me out the door a lot. Like she knew I was extremely different. I distinctly remember her and I sitting at the kitchen table, and her saying that if my face didn’t show emotion spontaneously I was just going to have to fake it to fit in because the world wasn’t going to work if I kept my wooden face.
I had a ridiculous temper. I fought (as in physically fought) my friends often. It always led to cathartic release and an improvement of our bond, which boy fights predictably do.
Sometimes I feel extremely fortunate to have grown up in the 1980s and not today. The way autistic kids are coddled today can be utterly inhumane. It instills in them a self image as a broken person who cannot fit in. That self image is far and away more damaging than autism.
Now, I know some people are unable to vocalize other than incoherent groaning at the age of twenty. I wasn’t that bad.
But among the kids who were enrolled in school, able to form sentences, I had it pretty bad and my little shithole town just treated me as “one of them weird kids”, and it worked out. Our cultures have had autistic people since the dawn of time; the expertise coming out of labs isn’t the only source of wisdom on how to help them lead good lives.
Doesn’t change the fact that US prices are orders of magnitude out of proportion. You simply can’t use it as a yardstick.
Now, if you’re looking at the plain amount of material, manufacturing, infrastructure, and labour required, then you’re making sense.
But it seems you’re making the argument that too many people cost more to care for than they are “worth” in terms of economics, and would be too great a burden on the productivity of the healthy for a universal healthcare system to function.
But that’s not even close to true. Universal healthcare is essentially an attempt at triage on national scale. To apply resources where they do the most good.
In comparison, commercial market healthcare is just less efficient across the board. A universal system is able to provide more care for more people at less cost, even if it isn’t able to do so for everyone in every situation.
No-one is claiming universal healthcare systems save everyone and care for every ailment, every time. The argument is that it’s simply the smarter way to use the resources a country has.
So, you totally hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t agree more: It is about maximizing resources for overall good. It is just that some groups may not see a qualitative difference in care.
I’m just doing some simple deductive reasoning. If a person who suffers from a disability receives life changing care and are able to rejoin the workforce you have taken someone who would otherwise cost tax payers and have added an income stream to the tax pool. Similarly you may provide care to people who aren’t necessarily disabled but have no means to get a life changing diagnosis and medication which allows them to complete higher education.
For every person you take out of the prison system and put into the workforce you are freeing up resources while also creating resources.
Man, I wish the hundreds of thousands of dollars of care we got positioned my kids into the workforce. Our reality is that all that while the care did help and make their lives much better - it won’t translate into productivity or self sufficiency. 🙁 I am super worried that will practically mean a universal healthcare system in the US limits disability care because it isn’t deemed as having a good enough ROI.
My kids don’t have full language capabilities, they struggle with fixations (which means learning has to be customized to their fixations or it won’t happen), and they don’t have enough situational awareness to be safe.
So, therapies are helpful in getting them enough language to have basic needs met (and minimize behavior issues), practicing doing things they don’t prefer for short bursts and learning things like how to behave in a parking lot. We may never get to productivity or self sufficiency - we are focused on staying alive.
My kids are real life examples demonstrating that huge investment, while good for the individuals, does not reduce the cost or burden of them to society later in their life. And that very concept could risk society’s willingness to pay for any disabled person’s full care under universal healthcare.
No, it is from unfortunate personal experience. Special needs families get the short end of the stick in a lot of ways - ours included. Feel free to IM me about it if you want specific anecdotes. After killing myself to get my kids what they need (navigating insurance denials, waiting lists for specialists, underfunded and confusing government programs, lack of childcare, hitting out of pocket maximums year after year, and taking jobs that leave me exhausted and with little family time to pay for it all), I have a huge defense mechanism for anything that sounds like it can quickly and easily solve this kind of situation - because I’ve been repeatedly shown it is a pipe dream. It doesn’t mean UHC isn’t a noble cause or the right way to go. But the reality is that it probably won’t be much of a qualitative change for families like ours. And it is hard to hear that our experiences and fears are not valid.
I hear where you’re coming from. I can’t even begin to imagine how tired you are after all these hardships. The fact that you’re still writing civil replies to the other person is commendable.
I would like to respectfully say that universal healthcare would have eliminated the need to navigate insurance denials and out of pocket maximums. If we add a more robust social safety net to the equation, you may also not have to worry about childcare and having to stretch yourself thin with work… Would eliminating these battles really not have brought qualitative changes (for the better) for your family?
EDIT: I responded in a way that was not helpful below and I’ve fixed it now…
I would tear off my right arm to have a robust enough safety net to take care of my kids adequately (and thanks to UHC in that situation, I would live thru it!).
This may come across as naïve, but I also wonder if the excision of all those “essential” layers of needless bureaucracy, might not free up some resources at a societal level to allow a more complete or holistic physical and mental health care system to emerge. After all we need to figure out something for the eye watering numbers of people who are employed directly or indirectly by the Insurance industries to do with their new found free time.
Hell, couple UHS with large scale tax reform and we might find that there are advantages at all levels of society to providing for people whatever their needs might be.
But then maybe I am a pathetic utopist who just needs to realise that Capitalism is simply the perfect structure for us all to live under.
You’re the one making a lot of assumptions based on what was originally a shower thought. It’s a nice thought but it’s completely and utterly incorrect in reality.
My kids are real life examples demonstrating that huge investment, while good for the individuals, does not reduce the cost or burden of them to society later in their life.
This isn’t an assumption, it’s a data point that contradicts your hypothetical theory.
The fundamental flaw in your thinking is your assumption that treating mental illness and disabilities will result in the person becoming a productive member of society. This is occasionally true, but much more commonly, the treatment serves to alleviate the more severe symptoms of the condition, without actually curing or fixing the condition.
Healthcare is primarily about minimizing the damage and suffering caused by various physical and mental ailments. It can’t magically transform people into something they’re not.
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