Yes, some preventive care can be intrusive to personal scheduling. For example, for those using colonoscopy for colorectal cancer screening, colonoscopy requires both time off for prep and a day off for both the patient and (usually) an escort. FIT is less intrusive, but those getting a positive result then have to do colonoscopy.
Do your inlaws have a Medicare Advantage supplement? My supplement (not an Advantage supplement) doesn’t require anything like this.
I think incentives that promote preventative health are great. That being said, the insurance companies don’t make much effort to publicize those incentives. I get a $150 fitness benefit. It took me a number of hours and phone calls to Blue Cross to apply for and finally receive that benefit.
Men with BRCA1 or 2 have increased risk of breast, prostate, and other cancers.
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Well…one thing we could do is to stop having Medicaid run by the states. Not only do the rates of reimbursement vary, the income limits for patients vary.
Someone I know works in an urban hospital. It is readily accessible from adjacent states. People use fake addresses so they can be treated in the jurisdiction with the highest income cut offs. Sometimes, it’s the “blue” liberal locality with the high cut offs and the neighboring “red” state has lower cut offs. So the “red” state brags about how well it’s managing its medicaid costs, while the neighboring “blue” state is actually treating a substantial portion of the poor people in the adjoining state.
Not if you live in rural Missouri, or Appalachia, or insert any other rural hospital that no longer has access to subspecialty care.
Care here is GREAT, in SOME places. It’s dismal in others and it’s expensive everywhere.
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Fair enough. But these are national standards and they are extremely rigorous for a very large country with a very dispersed population. Maybe they make exceptions for sparsely populated rural populations that don’t have the necessary medical infrastructure.
I agree that our healthcare has significant deficiencies, but dismal is also in the eye of the beholder.
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Have you visited an emergency room in the last year? 13 hour waits in DC this week for elderly patients with cardiac conditions.
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This is definitely a major problem. The reason is usually a combination of inadequate # of hospital beds and a huge influx of patients to the hospital. In my state, 1/4 of the existing hospitals were closed in the past 20 years. In some locations, a shortage of personnel exacerbates the problem.
But this terrible situation isn’t unique to the US.
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Yes, it not unique. But given that we spend far more money on health care than any other country, it is unacceptable.
Yes, the problem isn’t so much that there isn’t enough money, but why isn’t it spent effectively.
In Canada affluent patients can take advantage of a work around. They can get certain surgeries at private clinics…but not in their home province! Wealthy Canadians just come to the US and pay full price.
As surgical wait lists grow, Canada’s private clinics cash in | CBC News
No doubt wealthy patients can and do buy quality care anywhere in the world. That doesnt address the remaining 99% who are not jetting off to Zurich for treatment.
Many countries have a 2 tiered medical system: a public hospital system for everyone and a private hospital system for people willing to pay more.
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Most wealthy Americans don’t leave the country to seek the best doctors and hospitals. By reputation, most of the best doctors and hospitals are all in the United States.
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Canada does not officially have a two-tiered system. The private sector there has developed due to the failings of the public system. The provincial governments are trying to figure out how to deal with it.
Canadian Medicare started in the late 1960’s and was complete by 1970. Prior to that Canada was like the US is now. It worked great for over 20 years because the government took over a system that had been built by the private sector. As time passed government regulations multiplied and medical technology exploded, the government has not been able to keep up.
“Like the US is now” meaning excessively expensive? Hard to believe in an absolute sense, since medical care in the 1960s and 1970s was much less expensive generally (whether paid by the patient, an employer, or the government), probably mainly because many of the expensive things done today did not exist at all back then.
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Technology and innovation is costly and tends to increase over time.
We are aware of a lot more conditions that were previously unknown. That has resulted in increased testing. Our tolerance of error has also gone down because of increased awareness and that has also increased testing. Unfortunately, the new technology both in terms diagnostics and therapeutics is still very crude, so the increased money spent often doesn’t translate into a return of investment in terms of meaningful public health benefit relative to what was spent.
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In 1960, you have multiple blocked arteries and need bypass surgery? Forget it. It didn’t exist.
No one doubts medicine has improved greatly over the last 50 years. The question is why the cost of that system in the US so greatly exceeds the cost in every other country, with results not any better and often worse for the majority of its people.
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You’re right. Those treatment didn’t exist back then. Yes, those treatments save loves; but they don’t cure coronary artery disease. Those patients still have to take expensive medications and require cardiac monitoring for their rest of their lives. And many patients will require repeat surgical interventions, sometimes multiple times, in the future. It’s all very costly.