Health care....Down Under

I see lots of discussion about Obamacare etc here. Thought I'd tell you about this. I am in Queensland, Australia, and am (was) covered to the hilt with private Health Insurance which is (was) not cheap. However:-

Couple of months ago, I was hit by a golf ball, and as a result, was briefly unconscious. Pretty much before I knew it, I was in an Ambulance and taken to a very large and new Public Hospital.

Out of the Ambulance on a stetcher, triaged, and bunged into my own curtained off 'room' in the Emergency Section, people swarming all over me, a catheter in the arm, Doctors and Nurses..... nausea stabilised, then off to X-Ray, and back to my Curtain Cave.

No bone break or flaking......pathology tests all done.......and I was told I was good to go, so 'go' I did...home, after fours in Hospital.

Cost to me.....not one cent. All covered by a 2% levy in incomes across Australia, and an Ambo levy on all electricity bills in Queensland.

So.....I cancelled that private Health Insurance.

 

So the bottom line is you like getting free things.

No surprise.

 

Great post. I have heard good things about Australian public insurance. In the US we pay outrageous prices for our private insurance and conservatives want to make it even harder for the poor and sick to pay. Glad you live in a country with a real healthcare system.

 

Its about as free as the fire truck services, public schools, and road services.

 

Not free at all. I told you how it was financed. Everyone pays as I said.

 

^ Creeping socialism.

That golfball was hit by a liberal trying to kill your granny.

You can have our broken healthcare system when you pry it from the cold dead hands of the tens of millions who can't afford insurance!

 

Affordable healthcare is for weaklings & communists.

 

What's even worse is how many conservatives say that without being facetious at all. I call it Klingon Coverage, "...the sick should die, and then we shall sing songs of how glorious their passing was"

 

I never was good as sports... and Karl Marx is kinda cool.

 

Yes we pay for Ambulance cover and dental but other than that public health care is fine, Australians are very fortunate, Medicare levy is 2% on taxable income. We rarely go to the doctor, but don't complain because one day if we need it then we know it's there.

 

Ambo cover differs from State to State. "Free" in Qld.....and paid for by that 'tricity level. Dental care is free in Qld through the public system, but waiting time can be long.

 

What is the definition of long wait time for dental? I never go to the dentist but last fall I made an unwise decision on my Harley and chipped some teeth. I cold called a couple dentists (they are all at least 30 miles away). The first place I called said they would love to help but I’d have to wait till next morning. They gave me a phone number of the place down the street a few blocks. They said come on down. By the time I got there they were set up and an hour after that my three teeth were back to normal, my credit card had been run, and I went home and went to work.

If I ever need dental again they will get my money. They earned it. Capitalism is kind of cool in my book.

 

Well....if you went through Emergency after your Harley prang and was taken to a Public Hospital in agony, you'd get that fixed there and then. If it was just an elective thing, not urgent...the wait could be months.

 

Conservatives in America are all Calvinists. God has an "Elect" and the way He indicates who they are is by sending sickness and trouble to them. So that if one is poor or sick it is because God hates them and if we try to help we are thwarting God's will. They also believe we are in the End Days and trying to conserve resources is therefore also blasphemy. That's what we have to put up with here, no ****.

 

It's all making sense now.

 

You should us it's cheaper to pay a little more in Taxes than pay a Lot More for private Healthcare.

Sounds like the intelligent thing to do .............. Like most other advanced societies do.

The Smart Thing !

 

The problem with Marxism is mostly the vapid reactionaries who followed. Marx was surprisingly positive toward Capitalism, he just wanted to go the full mile.

I think the issue with his solution is that communism is not a viable power structure, so socialism never attains it. It devolves into tyranny and dictatorship instead.

A system needs to first be stable before it can do anything else.

 

Same in the UK. Private health insurance is really only for non urgent treatment and not really worth having. I cancelled mine a long time ago. I have used private health care since then but paid there at the time mostly to satisfy a concern or to quickly confirm a diagnosis which probably would not have been covered by my private health insurance.

 

Those who cling to the most expensive healthcare system on earth (many of whom like their "free things" such as subsidies by employers for health insurance) are quite generous in bestowing "free things" upon the tens of millions uninsured who incur the bloated costs of hospital ERs for their needed medical care that are routinely dumped on the American taxpayer.

Many are incorrigible ideologues incapable of accepting the empirical reality of advanced democracies actually realizing Trump's airy-fairy promise of covering "everybody!" at "less cost!", but the current lavish inefficiencies have substantive benefits for the hoards of voracious middle-man profiteers who gorge themselves at the public trough, e,g., all those astronomical executive salaries for repeatedly-duplicated functions, none of which actually treat or cure anyone.

 

I think ideologues, of whatever stripe, should try to free themselves from their abstract dogma, and embrace the pragmatic reality that the most advanced nations on earth have demonstrated, the proven paradigm that covers everyone at far lower cost, Trump's stated goal.

 

"Free things" again. No, they're not free and nobody believes they are. Is Social Security free? Is Medicare free? Is the military free? Are roads and airports free? How about law enforcement? Are "free" clinics free? Responsible people have voted to pay for these things through state, federal, and local taxes.

Is our current health care system free? America's health care delivery is the most expensive in the world and our outcomes don't even make to the top 20. Is that free stuff? You're paying for it. I will bet my life's savings the Aussie universal health care system is better than ours and cheaper than ours.

Forgive me but I get fricken tired of the mindless crap that gets shoveled out from right wing tank radio and Trump city every day. The "free stuff" one burns me the most.

 

It is the fake confection of those whose ideological dogma might be comparably mischaracterized as being determined to pay the highest price for a demonstrably inferior product, the sensibility and morality of which both elude me.

 

Um no. They pay for it through taxes.

 

Wasn’t emergency. Just out of curiosity, in Australia how long does one wait to start treatment for say cancer after diagnosis?