Healthcare Systems Failing in the USA

[pameladlloyd]

My husband is sitting in the next room, watching Meet the Press, while I sit at my computer and listen in, occasionally commenting on situations I find particularly vexing. There's a lot going on in the world today that's of concern (I'm understating. Bigtime!) and I'm not always happy with the ways in which politicians attempt to defend our country's position. But the thing that made me sit up and really pay attention, was the following statement, spoken by Senator Harry Reid:

In Nevada, for example, David, at our University Medical Center in Las Vegas, they stopped cancer treatment. People who are in Las Vegas--two weeks ago, women who had breast cancer treatment were said, "We have no place for you to go." They had to leave the state to do that. [link]

Now, I knew our health system was lousy, but it never even occurred to me that something like that could happen.

What other treatments, I wonder, have also been stopped. What is happening to the people who can't afford to travel out of state to seek life-saving medical treatments? How can we allow this to happen? Aren't there some less critical state governmental functions that could have been shut down, so that their operating funds could be funneled to this hospital? Why hasn't the federal government stepped in to prevent this?

This whole situation gets a big stamp of FAIL from me.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. We moan here in the UK about the postcode lottery that makes some drugs available to some patients and not to others, but this usually relates to new and relatively untried treatments, not to their main medical care.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of the postcard lottery. When you say this is for new and untried treatments, do mean that they are experimental, or that they've passed the experimental stage, but are not yet widely available?

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

postcard lottery

Possibly that was a typo, but I meant postcode, (like the US zipcode) lottery. That is, the treatment a patient receives can be determined by where they live.

In the UK we have this thing called NICE who basically say what the NHS will pay for and what's too expensive/not proven to be effective enough.

No one likes to say it out loud, but ultimately there has to be rationing because to do everything anyone could ever possibly want would take an infinite amount of money. In practice most people get good treatment when they need it and don't have to pay a penny (other than the taxes they've paid all their lives, of course). However, we sometimes get a controversial case where someone will be demanding some brand new wonder drug and their health authority won't provide it.

NICE are supposed to evaluate all new drugs and treatments to ascertain whether, for example, a new cancer drug is better than what's currently in use. Sometimes desperate patients will demand something that is brand new, just out of the experimental stage and just coming into general use. Usually new drugs at this stage are expensive, so it all gets very difficult. How do you balance giving someone with terminal cancer another 6 months of life against using that money to do several hip replacements?

Sometimes, for some reason, one health authority in one region will adopt a drug before other areas do. (Hence postcode lottery.) Actually my daughter who is Rhesus negative (like me) went over the border to England to get an injection to prevent the formation of antibodies during her pregnancy. Wales now do offer it, but didn't then. Our daughter paid for it privately, but not everyone can afford to do that and anyway it then leads to accusations of a two-tier system, one for those with money and one for those without.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that discrepancies like the one you mention are one of the things that people over here point to, when advocates for universal (or near-universal) health care is discussed. Yet, when they do this, they ignore the many people here who get little to no medical care, because they can't afford it.

Is the treatment new? It does seem to me, however, to be the sort of preventative treatment that will save more money than it costs, which I think should be a strong factor for making it universally available.

Do you feel that by living in Wales you are less likely to be eligible for treatments?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It will be like in China, where if you can't afford care, you just resign yourself to die. I heard a mother of one of the children who been fed exclusively formula that was adulterated with melamine: he had kidney stones, and now has leukemia. (That may not be caused by the melamine; they don't know.) The family can't afford the cost of a bone marrow transplant, so the boy will just die.

:-(

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

The melamine situation is just terrible. It's so indescribably sad and distressing to think that it is possible anywhere in the world for us to allow infant formula or any other product to be consumed by humans or animals to be contaminated by toxic substances.

[marycatelli]

Or Canada, where one out of three doctors has sent patients to the US to get treatment they can't get in Cananda

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I've heard so many things, both good and bad about the US health care system in comparison to the systems in Canada and other countries. It seems likely that there are things the Canadian system handles better than that in the US, and things the US system handles better. I also know that there's great variation from state to state with regard to the health care system. I've actually seen it for myself and my family, as I've interacted with health practitioners here in Arizona and compared them to the care my family in Texas receive and the care I received, when I still lived there.