Millions of people in America are receiving healthcare that rivals Third World standards. Vast regions of the country have seen medical services evaporate over the past decade. Hospitals have closed, doctors have left, and pharmacies have been forced into bankruptcy.
Full article, HERE from the Washington Examiner.
This isn’t a new problem… From a 2017 article in the WAPO, HERE. There is also the whole malpractice cost issue for doctors. And a lot of doctors are still trying to pay off medical school costs on top of everything else.
And it is not just doctors. Medicare/Medicaid cuts for care are bankrupting rural hospitals that don’t have ICUs/Specialty care/Surgical staff, article HERE from Torch.
And as more and more ‘push’ for ‘nationalize’ healthcare, the media continues to downplay/ignore the horror stories coming out of Canada, England, and the other places where there are ‘panels’ that make decisions on whether or not you can get surgery. NOT when you can, but IF you can…
Lots of folks say the VA sucks, and yes, many of them do, but at least some of them are actually trying to improve services. I’m thankful that is an option for me.
Food deserts are bad enough, but medical deserts are literally killers…
Canada and the UK are catastrophes so far as health care goes — my daughter has lived in both. And it’s not just surgery — the wait for dentists can be in the years. Perhaps more ominous is that both jurisdictions approve “assisted dying”. It’s an interesting approach to reducing the population of those who need medical care… or if they are younger and special needs, that kind of care…
The VA has always been good to me.
My mother quit volunteering at the local hospice when the “pro-euthanasia” members of the board forced out those attempting to make a principled stand against the government edict. (Canada)
VA is fine but I’ve always been a big proponent of “give qualified veterans a voucher and let them shop around”. Nearest VA hospital to me is about two hours and I’m closer than some friends. Clinics are not really set up to do much other than send you to the hospital. I am fortunate that I have private insurance through my job though so I don’t have to use them anyway.
On a related but slightly different topic my one experience with VA care they just wanted to drug me up and give me more drugs to deal with the side effects. I walked away for alternative treatments. When I look at the number of drugs my vet buddies are taking I wonder if the VA is really serious about their health.
I found corporate healthcare not always good. When Obamacare was put into law it eliminated multiple health care plans in many states leaving just a few. Companies, Doctors and Hospitals were forced into these and costs rose high with limits on what was given.
My Doctor in the healthcare quit and started a personal practice. Me and my wife went to our Doctor’s practice as we got better service.
Ian- Glad she ‘survived’ that…
Mike- Me too!
Hereso- Agreed, and that is an option I’ve used a time or two. One thing I’ve found is that having ONE doctor helps to manage the ‘extra’ prescriptions.
JG- Yep, concierge practices ARE on the upswing, but they have to have a large enough ‘customer’ base to maintain it. States like WVA don’t…
I lived in Columbia County OR, just downriver from the 3-county Portland area, for 21 years. (Got out just after Trump’s win, when things first started going batsh_t…) For people in rural St. Helens, Scappoose, Yankton, Warren, etc, or any of the big woods further out, it was 45 – 90 min to get up and over twisty Cornelius Pass Road to get to the closest big hospital in Beaverton or Hillsboro. Dicey in the winter months because the greenie-weenies banned road salt. Life Flight wasn’t always an option, or if it was it’d just be part of the bankrupting process.
There was talk going on for over 10 years of building a small clinic at a nice site between St. Helens and Scappoose, but political differences quashed it: the State insisted that the clinic *must* include abortion services, and the locals were having none of that. Can we have a hospital so that a local construction guy who just sliced himself can get stitched up? NO sir, not unless we get to kill babies in your community as well.
I just looked on GoogleMaps and the site is still vacant.
Like a lot of things Ronald reagan said, this one seems applicable here:
“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.”
And the more government fails the people, the more power it gets to double down on the failure.
As husband to one physician and father to another, costs are going up because of government “help” and also because trial lawyers have driven up malpractice insurance and caused a lot of unnecessary procedures and prescriptions.
Also, it says something when insurance companies finance private surgical clinics which can operate at a significant factor less than doing the same surgery in a hospital.
Bureaucracies always are parasitic and self serving, even those that start out with good intentions.
If a billing clerk or computer coder is involved in a mistaken billing to Medicare, inadvertent or otherwise, they and their uplines are at risk of criminal prosecution.
Guy- Interesting, NOT in a good way.
Tom- All true!
LTC- That may be true, but there sure are a ‘lot’ of ‘interesting’ codes that get put in for reimbursement…
I waited two months for an appointment to a U of M doctor.
Private practice appears to be a thing of the past for lesser moneyed folk.
When I arrived, I was told to put on a mask.
So I’m still looking for a doctor.
Ed- That sucks. Sorry to hear it.
BIL had two medical clinics in different towns. The .gov got so controlling during the plandemic that my sister said they were looking at laying off ~45 employees during it. He gets sick a lot since getting the vaxx, when he never got ill previously, so they recently sold the business to some group. I assume he is retiring now, younger than expected for a physician.
Pass the EMTALA law that REQUIRES hospitals to provide care to anyone and everyone without regard to ability or willingness to pay then import TENS OF MILLIONS of turd world parasites and guess what happens to your ‘healthcare system’.
Ed, my state still requires masks for medical facilities (at least as of a few weeks ago) so it may not be their choice. Hell, they required masks to visit the barber until just a couple months ago. My barber of 20 years still requires masks so I may be looking for a new barber. I will tell her before I go though and give her the option of changing her policy before losing business.
Left talks a lot about desert this, and desert that.
Medicine is part of a deliberate effort to ruin medicine by the left.
Crime now is clearly influenced by the ‘enforcement desert’ that the left deliberately and maliciously created.
The root issue here is the left contribution to ‘civilization desert’ (because the left has no civilization in them), and the ‘peace desert’ that their presence would create if they did not bring their gross incompetence to the practice of violence.
‘Evidence based’ seems to mean nothing of the sort.
They ruin everything they touch, and then complain that ‘society is biased’ and ‘society has a systemic problem’ simply because the left touches some people more strongly than the left touches other people.