[--Steve-O--]

How many of you out there live in a country with a national health care system? better question. are you happy with this health care system? or is it the devil our american radio and television media make it out to be? Frankly i dont trust a damn word that leaves anybodies mouth if they are on TV, radio or even movies, they all seem to have a byas towards it, claiming its a "communist system" and its evil, and they constantly banter on and on about how bad it is, we never really hear anything good about it save for that moore fella. big surprise right? . i want to know from from real people that live under this system how they feel about it. now forgive me if this has been asked already on this forum, i feel that this is a question i myself am asking and want answers to, i dont want already provided answers, if that makes any sense.
Our private health care system sucks the big and i want to know for if national health care is actually better or worse. 

[Rictor]

I live in Canada where we have a public healthcare system. Can't really comment on it from personal experience, as I'm young and (thankfully) healthy, so I've never used it. But I've heard from others that the wait-times are really long, even for simple procedures.

[Shade]

We have it here. And it works very well for the most part, though it has been struggling a bit lately due to a combination of a lack of trained doctors and too much political meddling. The first would still be true if it were private healthcare instead, and frankly, I'd take the second over the kind of meddling that might happen if they had to actually make a profit. After all, politicians have a vested interest in making sure their voters get proper care.

As it stands, everyone gets cared for (and, rare lapses aside, cared for well), old, young, rich, poor, and none of them need fear that falling ill at a bad time might cost them their house, their car, or whatever.

You do have to wait in line (and sometimes for a while) for non-critical procedures, but if something needs to be done fast, it gets done fast.

[Mika]

Pretty much what Shade says, but here the system used to be a lot more better before the time of"efficiency" thinking, that being the late 1990s. Since then it has been a slight downhill. So the public health care system was quite good before the politicians and other idiots got to it - seeing cost reduction in one area while multiplying costs somewhere else. It is hard to believe I'm watching the very system going down, and it is only ten years difference.

The funny thing is that it used to be a lot better during the "evil" communism days than good capitalistic nowadays.

Mika

[Flaser]

Keep in mind though, that with the advent of "modern" (patented, easy and cheap to produce and making gigabillions of profit out of expensive prices to recure "research cost") medicine and diagnostics the actual price (that someone has to pay no matter who's in charge or paying) of health has skyrocketed.

Then we have nasty stuff like pharmaceutical companies offering massive "gifts", "congresses"  to exotic locations or outright bribe to doctors to prescribe their medicine. Since the national health-care pays for the medicine and doctors here in Eastern Europe are still held in awe (a potent position of authority over the mundane "messes") the patient rarely ever complains - and all of us have to pay the massive price of this corruption, since the actual bribes going to the doctors is but pocket money compared to the profits made this way.

Combine this with a system where the whole infrastructure is decades old and desperately in need of both upgrades and just plain maintenance.
Further combine this with  a society who has taken free health-care so much for granted, that they are against "ANYTHING" that would "UPSET" this delicate state of affairs.
As icing add huge lobbies like pharmacologists, estate speculators who want to get their hands on the prime sites several - up to now state owned - estates the hospitals used.
The final spice is the politicians - on both sides of the spectrum - who're irrevocably intervowen with the whole corrupt ordeal.

....and now you have an inkling of understanding why the Hungarian Health Reform is so urgently NEEDED, as well as UTTERLY HOPELESS.

[DeepSpace9er]

Hmm.. government run health care vs private run healthcare. There will ALWAYS be lines and waiting times in government run healthcare because you are giving something with a limited supply (money for healthcare) to people with unlimited demand, ie shortages and RATIONING. Healthcare is the only industry where, not only are the hospitals and pharmaceudical companies not make much profit (compared to other industries of equal size) its WRONG for them to make a profit. If there is no profit incentive, the industry is going to suck.

[Kosh]

Pfizer made more than $9 billion in Q4 last year. That isn't ?

[Mika]

Hmm.. government run health care vs private run healthcare. There will ALWAYS be lines and waiting times in government run healthcare because you are giving something with a limited supply (money for healthcare) to people with unlimited demand, ie shortages and RATIONING.

This wasn't so here ten years ago. Government run healthcare was very adequate for everybody, until they started to make "cost efficiency" moves which turns out to actually cause more costs in the long run. The root of this stupidity is the separation of each ministry and budgeting the costs for those ministries. Each ministry is trying to maximize their funding, but anyone with half a brain would soon mention that the costs are simply shifted between ministries and the common sense will dictate that the government will not save any extra money - but only generate unnecessary amount of extra bureaucracy.

The side effect is that the patients either have to be transported from the villages to hospitals and the bill is send to government, or the patients will pay more money for private health care, or the patients will simply see their symptomes as "not bad enough" to warrant medical treatment. In any case, government actually loses money one way or the other.
Before this time, every village of sufficient size used to have a doctor of their own and some cases could be treated in place, while some others were treated in nearby villages. Rarely there was need to go to a central hospital.

Regarding the medical industry connections with doctors, this probably is the case with the private run health care also. Doctors are still taught in the universities, and if you can get brand of your medicine in the heads of the doctors during that time, that will be the medicine they will prescribe. From what I have understood, the private health care treatment costs are far more higher than public health care here.

Also, I don't know about what the statistics will say about this, but there seems to be something strange going on with the doctor education in the universities. I have recently met a lot of people who have been very disappointed about the medical treatment they have received. Surgical operations have failed and clear mistakes have happened, some of them close to lethal. This was not so 10 years ago.

Mika

[Knight Templar]

Pfizer made more than $9 billion in Q4 last year. That isn't ?

I think he's thinking more along the lines of health care facilities - doctor's offices, hospitals, etc. Also, pharmaceutical companies in general are notorious for amorality in general - they make the real bucks in the Medical industry, as you pointed out. They do it by charging a lot for essential drugs and medicines people need to stay alive, a lot of drugs which are actually taken from local recipes from places like South America, without paying any royalties.

[Fearless Leader]

ok ok ok
I clicked on this topic because Ive been on  computers all night and I thought it said "national vs pirate health care"  and from that point I became convinced it had something to do with ninjas....

There are ups and downs to either, public means doctors wont have accountability as much as in the private sector, it also means higher taxes.
Private means you will have higher bills and have to foot the bill your self.

Pirate health care involves taking money from somebody and using it to pay the doctor that you kidnapped.
Ninja health care involves killing everyone inline ahead of you, then killing the hospital staff to prevent them from identifying you, after that you have to have a buddie shrink down, go inside your body and fix whatever is wrong with you.