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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
on to your pandemic questions.....if people are emergency type sick, they are not refused treatment. If these people end up not being able to pay back the costs, the hospitals are either 'out the cost' or receive some compensation from the government. That compensation comes back to us as taxpayers or higher costs for care later on. If we make it so that people MUST pay for the care they receive, people will be careful on when they actually have to go to the ER or doctor and when they will deal with their virus and ride it out. Less patients for a hospital means less income which will lead to lower prices due to a number of issues. Therefore the cost of private healthcare WILL go down.
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The rest I have no problems with..... it's this part.
If when this pandemic hits (and it's going to be horrid, because Bush has Martial Law plans ready for it), then we are in serious trouble.
What got me started on this train of thought is watching 60 Minutes' bit on it (I was watching the show to see Howard Stern.... great piece on him BTW).... and they said that if it mutates and becomes human borne, we'll have like 30 days to contain it.
Now, the question that has to be focussed on here in the US is this.....
Most people who can't afford healthcare end up waiting until it is seriously bad before they go.
That means as the flu incubated in them they could have passed it on to everyone they met, and so on and so on. So by the time they do go into the hospital, they have infected exponentially far more people than if they had felt safe enough and not scared of the cost to go and get treated as soon as symptoms started showing.
Preventative medicine so to speak.
This is what bothers me, what scares me, what shows the system to be fatally flawed.
We cannot wait for people to get to the point where they are hospitalized before we treat them, in cases like these. We may not have time to. We need to educate the people to feel safe to go in and not worry about cost the second they show symptoms.
If we don't, if we allow people to get to the point of no return before we treat them...... then we'll have a much bigger and worse problem on our hands.