Universal health care in a universe created by God

[phyllo]

The number of homeless in Toronto was 12,196 in 2024. Total Toronto population is 3.35 million.

Your city is not "full of such cases".

That's 0.3% or about 1 in 300 ------ But in reality, the homeless you see on the street aren't the whole story. There is a much greater number of people lacking homes. Some live in their cars, others are able to "couch surf". Some are in shelters. I don;t know the criteria Toronto uses for homeless.

You can read the details here:
https://www.toronto.ca/community-people ... ssessment/

People who live in cars or "couch surf" can get medical treatment. They are not somehow excluded from the system.

[MikeNovack]

People who live in cars or "couch surf" can get medical treatment. They are not somehow excluded from the system.

I'm here of course. Actually it can be difficult for people living in cars or couch surfing, etc. to be "in the system". Often an ADDRESS is required. I'm talking abut any social service system, not just medical.

This might be a case of rules and regulations not having caught up with changes in technology. These days, even the homeless might have a cell phone number by which they might be contacted.

[Immanuel Can]

So, who or what do you think is responsible for the apparent failure of universal health in Canada?

Economics.

There is no evil villain here, Gary, nobody cackling away and cracking his knuckles with glee. Economics itself it the problem. Medical care is hugely expensive: to universalize it requires wads and wads of cash, and on a regular-inflow basis. That means it can only thrive in an economy highly energized by the much-despised "capitalism" -- one that continuously generates lots and lots of new value and surplus funds to be siphoned off into the medical system.

But I don't know where this can work. In Norway, for example, they can do it only by tapping continuously into huge offshore oil reserves -- the very reserves the Socialists despise as "capitalist" and "carbon generating." But not every country has huge oil reserves; and oil reserves don't last forever, even if they did.

This is why places like Canada or the UK have a "universal health care" system in name only. In practice, even in such countries, it's never been the case that people could be served by such a system fully, or indefinitely. It requires far too much money, far too much scope in the system as well, in order to cover everybody for everything.

Like Socialism, it's an "ideal" rather than anything that has to do with reality. Would I like to see that ideal realized? Sure. Absolutely. But in order to realize it, there has to be a plan...one that works...one that is economically sustainable, as well. And nobody has ever had that, if we are honest with ourselves. So what we have to do is work within the bounds of what we can make real -- that is, if our care about what happens to others is at all genuine or sincere. They cannot survive on mere "ideals," no matter how much we may love those ideals. Whatever we do, our solution is bound to be partial, flawed and temporary, rather than ideal.

But that's life.

[Gary Childress]

So, who or what do you think is responsible for the apparent failure of universal health in Canada?

Economics.

There is no evil villain here, Gary, nobody cackling away and cracking his knuckles with glee. Economics itself it the problem. Medical care is hugely expensive: to universalize it requires wads and wads of cash, and on a regular-inflow basis. That means it can only thrive in an economy highly energized by the much-despised "capitalism" -- one that continuously generates lots and lots of new value and surplus funds to be siphoned off into the medical system.

But I don't know where this can work. In Norway, for example, they can do it only by tapping continuously into huge offshore oil reserves -- the very reserves the Socialists despise as "capitalist" and "carbon generating." But not every country has huge oil reserves; and oil reserves don't last forever, even if they did.

This is why places like Canada or the UK have a "universal health care" system in name only. In practice, even in such countries, it's never been the case that people could be served by such a system fully, or indefinitely. It requires far too much money, far too much scope in the system as well, in order to cover everybody for everything.

Like Socialism, it's an "ideal" rather than anything that has to do with reality. Would I like to see that ideal realized? Sure. Absolutely. But in order to realize it, there has to be a plan...one that works...one that is economically sustainable, as well. And nobody has ever had that, if we are honest with ourselves. So what we have to do is work within the bounds of what we can make real -- that is, if our care about what happens to others is at all genuine or sincere. They cannot survive on mere "ideals," no matter how much we may love those ideals. Whatever we do, our solution is bound to be partial, flawed and temporary, rather than ideal.

But that's life.

Well, that leaves us basically where we started. Apparently, economic realities won't allow for universal healthcare to be a success, and economic realities won't allow for a for-profit model to be a success. So either way, the same people are going to get screwed over. It all comes down to which you would rather see: disenfranchised people struggling to get health care or disenfranchised people struggling to get health care.

So what do we turn to if not vital statistics? Which countries are doing better in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality? Should that not be the final measure of a healthcare system?

[FlashDangerpants]

So, who or what do you think is responsible for the apparent failure of universal health in Canada? If we take it as a given that the system there is broken, as you seem to say it is, then what?

You screwed up at the start of this thread when you chose to title it about universal health care instead of universal health insurance. IC has been taking advantage of that screw up ever since. And it is time for you to show evidence of learning because he is not capable of that, but you are.

The term universal health care is taken by IC, apparently with your at least tacit acquiescence, to imply some unlimited supply of healthcare, a cornucopia of wellness overflowing with Viagra for the boys, and breast reductions for the girls. Unlimited access at the drop of a hat to a series of doctors who can prod you, stick fingers into you, and finally issue you with a suppository of reassuringly large proportions to fix what ails you.

In short he has taken it to imply a society in which every 100 patients is defended against heart disease and hair loss by 500 doctors. And you have allowed him to make that the impossible standard that you are weighed down by.

The truth is that how much healthcare of any sort is available in any society is a result of how much individuals are prepared to pay for the stuff + how much of it companies are prepared to buy for their employees + how much is provided by NGOs, charities, churches and other cults + how much the government of the day is prepared to spend on it, as decided by voters in a democracy.

Canadian voters have not prioritised heavy spending on healthcare, they haven't' prioritised structural reform either. That might change, but until it does, the amount of product in the market is fixed at 11.3% of GDP (compared to the USA at 17%).

The term universal health insurance is a different beast. When the exact same health insurance is available for all, that doesn't imply any cornucopia of unlimited boob jobs for the boys and bunion plasters for the girls. It says that healthcare won't be rationed by income level any more, and will be rationed according to some other metric (need being one, time in the queue another, there's many more though).

The US system is monstrously inefficient, and universal insurance is wildly superior in that regard. If the USA adopted the Canadian insurance model (or better still the Dutch or Swiss versions) but continued to plough that insane 17.2% of GDP into the thing, you would have the finest healthcare in the world and the best-served population, which is not what you have right now.

If you could time travel far enough back to have such in place before Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin to the market and was allowed to advertise it quite absurdly as an opioid with low risk of addiction to a bunch of doctors who are financially incentivised to sell as many pills as possible to their clients you would be able to prevent the "fentanyl crisis" that your broken healthcare system created.

[Gary Childress]

So, who or what do you think is responsible for the apparent failure of universal health in Canada? If we take it as a given that the system there is broken, as you seem to say it is, then what?

You screwed up at the start of this thread when you chose to title it about universal health care instead of universal health insurance. IC has been taking advantage of that screw up ever since. And it is time for you to show evidence of learning because he is not capable of that, but you are.

The term universal health care is taken by IC, apparently with your at least tacit acquiescence, to imply some unlimited supply of healthcare, a cornucopia of wellness overflowing with Viagra for the boys, and breast reductions for the girls. Unlimited access at the drop of a hat to a series of doctors who can prod you, stick fingers into you, and finally issue you with a suppository of reassuringly large proportions to fix what ails you.

In short he has taken it to imply a society in which every 100 patients is defended against heart disease and hair loss by 500 doctors. And you have allowed him to make that the impossible standard that you are weighed down by.

The truth is that how much healthcare of any sort is available in any society is a result of how much individuals are prepared to pay for the stuff + how much of it companies are prepared to buy for their employees + how much is provided by NGOs, charities, churches and other cults + how much the government of the day is prepared to spend on it, as decided by voters in a democracy.

Canadian voters have not prioritised heavy spending on healthcare, they haven't' prioritised structural reform either. That might change, but until it does, the amount of product in the market is fixed at 11.3% of GDP (compared to the USA at 17%).

The term universal health insurance is a different beast. When the exact same health insurance is available for all, that doesn't imply any cornucopia of unlimited boob jobs for the boys and bunion plasters for the girls. It says that healthcare won't be rationed by income level any more, and will be rationed according to some other metric (need being one, time in the queue another, there's many more though).

The US system is monstrously inefficient, and universal insurance is wildly superior in that regard. If the USA adopted the Canadian insurance model (or better still the Dutch or Swiss versions) but continued to plough that insane 17.2% of GDP into the thing, you would have the finest healthcare in the world and the best-served population, which is not what you have right now.

If you could time travel far enough back to have such in place before Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin to the market and was allowed to advertise it quite absurdly as an opioid with low risk of addiction to a bunch of doctors who are financially incentivised to sell as many pills as possible to their clients you would be able to prevent the "fentanyl crisis" that your broken healthcare system created.

Thank you for chiming in. You are more than welcome to contribute to this conversation, though you seldom do. You seem to know more about it than I do. So am I to understand correctly that the same health insurance for all is the best option? One of the options I've been proposing throughout this thread has been along the lines of "Medicare for all". Does that count as the same health insurance for all? Or where do you see me going wrong with that line of thought?

[promethean75]

Only because everything in a capitalist economy is so artifically inflated in price is it so important that a person with a medical degree gets paid so much after he finishes school and starts a practice.

It's called passing the buck. Those with great talents and job skills get fucked financially in their education and/or apprenticeship. The only way to recover from this debt and live comfortably in the 21st century is to pass that burden on to the consumer. That's why they wanted me to pay $26,000 for an hour long bulging disk surgery.

Now it starts out like this; the new doctor wants to get right to work, making mad bank. Starts a practice, gets caught up financially in a year, and then starts having vast amounts of money to blow. Now he's no longer only passing the buck but has undergone a complete bourgeois transformation. Unlike the capitalist who exploits his wage workers, the doc with the private practice exploits the insurance companies (without which he couldn't price his services so high)... and the insurance companies, in turn, exploit the consumers (many who never need the medical treatment they've been paying so many years to have the opportunity to use). Incidentally, those consumers are the very people that give the two parties trying to f*** them the actual permission to do so through their consent to pay.

Yeah no you gotta make big superstructure changes to make healthcare work. You can't just tryda slide in socialist stuff 'cause it won't work.

[Immanuel Can]

So, who or what do you think is responsible for the apparent failure of universal health in Canada?

Economics.

There is no evil villain here, Gary, nobody cackling away and cracking his knuckles with glee. Economics itself it the problem. Medical care is hugely expensive: to universalize it requires wads and wads of cash, and on a regular-inflow basis. That means it can only thrive in an economy highly energized by the much-despised "capitalism" -- one that continuously generates lots and lots of new value and surplus funds to be siphoned off into the medical system.

But I don't know where this can work. In Norway, for example, they can do it only by tapping continuously into huge offshore oil reserves -- the very reserves the Socialists despise as "capitalist" and "carbon generating." But not every country has huge oil reserves; and oil reserves don't last forever, even if they did.

This is why places like Canada or the UK have a "universal health care" system in name only. In practice, even in such countries, it's never been the case that people could be served by such a system fully, or indefinitely. It requires far too much money, far too much scope in the system as well, in order to cover everybody for everything.

Like Socialism, it's an "ideal" rather than anything that has to do with reality. Would I like to see that ideal realized? Sure. Absolutely. But in order to realize it, there has to be a plan...one that works...one that is economically sustainable, as well. And nobody has ever had that, if we are honest with ourselves. So what we have to do is work within the bounds of what we can make real -- that is, if our care about what happens to others is at all genuine or sincere. They cannot survive on mere "ideals," no matter how much we may love those ideals. Whatever we do, our solution is bound to be partial, flawed and temporary, rather than ideal.

But that's life.

Well, that leaves us basically where we started.

Exactly right: universal health care is an imaginary ideal that nobody has ever had, and unless we can discover a very different kind of economics, nobody ever will. So we will have to keep tweaking the existing realities, hoping to do the most medical "justice" we can, and accept that it's never going to be perfect.

The alternative is not that we get the ideal. The alternative is that we crash the medical system and perhaps the whole economy, and nobody gets health care.

So what do we turn to if not vital statistics? Which countries are doing better in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality? Should that not be the final measure of a healthcare system?

It would depend. Countries are different from one another. In sub-Saharan Africa, malaria kills more people than anything. Surely that makes it a major health issue, does it not? But Sweden has a malaria rate of zero: so does that mean that Sweden's better at treating malaria than Botswana is? No, it means that Sweden's a much healthier country, and it has nothing to do with health care; it has to do with conditions. After all, nobody in Botswana dies of frostbite; but some do in Sweden.

If we can find two places that have exactly the same climate, medical challenges, population, wealth, technology, nutrition, education, social habits (like smoking, drinking and drug use), and so on, and one has universal health care and the other doesn't, then we can test out the hypothesis. But we can't compare Sweden and Botswana. Not only are they different, but neither, I think, has full universal health care. (Sweden, for example, has decentralized health delivery, copayments, caps and no prescription coverage. I think you mean more than that, when you say "universalized," do you not?)

[FlashDangerpants]

So, who or what do you think is responsible for the apparent failure of universal health in Canada? If we take it as a given that the system there is broken, as you seem to say it is, then what?

You screwed up at the start of this thread when you chose to title it about universal health care instead of universal health insurance. IC has been taking advantage of that screw up ever since. And it is time for you to show evidence of learning because he is not capable of that, but you are.

The term universal health care is taken by IC, apparently with your at least tacit acquiescence, to imply some unlimited supply of healthcare, a cornucopia of wellness overflowing with Viagra for the boys, and breast reductions for the girls. Unlimited access at the drop of a hat to a series of doctors who can prod you, stick fingers into you, and finally issue you with a suppository of reassuringly large proportions to fix what ails you.

In short he has taken it to imply a society in which every 100 patients is defended against heart disease and hair loss by 500 doctors. And you have allowed him to make that the impossible standard that you are weighed down by.

The truth is that how much healthcare of any sort is available in any society is a result of how much individuals are prepared to pay for the stuff + how much of it companies are prepared to buy for their employees + how much is provided by NGOs, charities, churches and other cults + how much the government of the day is prepared to spend on it, as decided by voters in a democracy.

Canadian voters have not prioritised heavy spending on healthcare, they haven't' prioritised structural reform either. That might change, but until it does, the amount of product in the market is fixed at 11.3% of GDP (compared to the USA at 17%).

The term universal health insurance is a different beast. When the exact same health insurance is available for all, that doesn't imply any cornucopia of unlimited boob jobs for the boys and bunion plasters for the girls. It says that healthcare won't be rationed by income level any more, and will be rationed according to some other metric (need being one, time in the queue another, there's many more though).

The US system is monstrously inefficient, and universal insurance is wildly superior in that regard. If the USA adopted the Canadian insurance model (or better still the Dutch or Swiss versions) but continued to plough that insane 17.2% of GDP into the thing, you would have the finest healthcare in the world and the best-served population, which is not what you have right now.

If you could time travel far enough back to have such in place before Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin to the market and was allowed to advertise it quite absurdly as an opioid with low risk of addiction to a bunch of doctors who are financially incentivised to sell as many pills as possible to their clients you would be able to prevent the "fentanyl crisis" that your broken healthcare system created.

Thank you for chiming in. You are more than welcome to contribute to this conversation, though you seldom do. You seem to know more about it than I do. So am I to understand correctly that the same health insurance for all is the best option? One of the options I've been proposing throughout this thread has been along the lines of "Medicare for all". Does that count as the same health insurance for all? Or where do you see me going wrong with that line of thought?

Medicare for all is possibly your path of least resistance, as it uses a system already built and used in the USA, with a bureaucracy and all the software already available. The amount of fraud it generates is one worry though. I think you can look abroad for other setups and probably find something a bit better in Europe or Japan. There's always a benefit to being the last to do something complicated after all, which is that you can learn from all the ways others have tried to do it. Britain's NHS struggles today from first-mover disadvantage in this regard, we nationalised most of the hospitals and built the world's largest bureaucracy to run an overly-centralised service. Most of Europe looked at what we did in the 50s and tried to think of something that worked better, they largely succeeded. You have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, that they made when avoiding ours. It should be good.

I would suggest thinking about other insurance matters such as cars. Why is it illegal to own and operate a motor vehicle on public roads without insurance almost everywhere except New Hampshire and New Zealand? The answer is only partly to do with paying for accidents you cause, the other is something called Adverse Selection in which people who think themselves to be at low risk are disinclined to buy insurance at all, while those who consider themselves at high risk want to buy excessive protection, and thus insurance premiums are raised beyond the level many can afford and so there is insufficient insurance available to cover all the damage done.

Health insurance is no different to motor insurance when it comes to adverse selective cost pressure. Enrolling everybody means that everyone is covered to the same basic mandatory level at least. Upselling extra insurance to those who wish to purchase it is unproblematic in the auto field, I have no objection to it in the health field.

Proper commies reject that last part on the basis that the rich will vote for higher taxes to pay for better health insurance for everybody if they aren't allowed to have anything better than what everyone gets for their own family. They have a decent point. I wouldn't feel all that bad about losing that argument.

[Immanuel Can]

You seem to know more about it than I do.

Don't let confidence fool you. As usual, Flash is just trolling. You'll find that nothing I said remotely resembled Flash's attempted "summary" of my position. I pointed to things like copayments, limited services, local delivery, no prescriptions, and so forth as evidence of less than "universal" healthcare -- not "boob jobs."

However, if your definition of "universal" allows for such things as copayments, limitations of service, de-centralized delivery, no prescription coverage and so on, you should say so: I will work with the definition you assign.

[promethean75]

"if they aren't allowed to have anything better than what everyone gets for their own family"

But there aren't degrees of successful heart surgery or tooth extraction. Either the tooth was pulled or it wasn't. The one doc is doing an extra special job that the neighbor's doc isn't doing? What's the story here?

If you're gonna do the flat tax thing, you gotta level the medical playing field so there are no fancy doctors that are getting the taxes raised by the rich people voting for em. That's what i mean, mate... you can't try to fudge in socialist fixes. You gotta wipe the whole thing.

[MikeNovack]

What does SOCIALISM have to do with it?

For example, I believe all the countries that have "universal health care'" (that you classify socialist) also have "universal primary education" (which I believe you are not classifying socialist). Are public roads "socialism"? Public fire departments?

So what makes health care different?

[FlashDangerpants]

Oh look, the Novak is helpfully going to assist Can in changing the subject. Obviously now that the socialism words has been introduced by the useful idiot the conversation will fail to go anywhere else.

He's virtually a tool of the capitalist oppression machine.

[Impenitent]

how many "citizens" will be forced to get a doctor's education and then work for the masses at no cost?

-Imp

[promethean75]

None, bro. There will be the same incentives for talented people to invest in an education. Because fewer people will be endowed with the abilities to become a brain surgeon, and because there is more invested in an education to become such (as opposed to a roofer's education), that job will pay very well. The ones with the capacity to become the docs will naturally rise to the occasion.

Long as you been a philosopher, Imp, and still you say stuff like "nuh-uh janito... er, i mean 'sanitation officers' will make as much as astrophysicists, bruh."

Lemme guess, they're gonna take your TV too, right? Night of the long communists.