When money dictates how the world should work.
Life is not medically necessary
In fact its a massive risk factor.
It’s the ultimate pre-existing condition.
I work in EMS. My advice to students and brand new EMTs is always the same: don’t freak out when your patient is in cardiac arrest. Those are the easy calls. I have to keep people alive and if someone is crashing in front of me I have to figure out why and what I can try to do to stop it so they don’t die. The ones that are already in cardiac arrest aren’t getting any more dead, and the only outcomes are that we improve on that or we don’t. We can’t make them worse. Dead is the most stable condition.
Yeah, but then your patients often get a 3000 dollar “ambulance” bill bcz ambulance companies are still privately run.
Some places have volunteer-only EMT services, and still charge thousands of dollars for an ambulance ride…
Forgive the long comment, and this is very US centered and doesn’t apply to every area in the US. EMS systems vary broadly between states and even municipalities within states…
To put some of that in perspective:
- A new ambulance costs about $250-$400k depending on the type.
- The heart monitors we use are somewhere in the area of $10k-$25k a piece. That’s ONE piece of the equipment that we use, and they need maintenance and replacement every so often.
- There’s all the other equipment, and restock of medical items. Even if something doesn’t get used it has to be on the truck and has to be replaced when it’s outdated.
- Fuel is expensive. The last agency I worked for spent about $400k - $500k a year just on fuel.
- There’s insurance - auto insurance, liability insurance, workman’s comp, etc.
- Keeping an EMS certification active requires ongoing continuing education credits. We take classes constantly to stay current and to be able to renew our cert, which in some states costs money just to renew. I’ve spent hundreds just to be able to work, both in con ed classes and certs. Some agencies will help pay for this cost, and many provide free con ed classes for their providers. This costs money.
- There’s building costs, rent, electric, etc.
- Ongoing vehicle maintenance (ambulances break a LOT)
- administrative costs, and so many more I haven’t listed
And that’s all before you get into paying anyone for their work. You aren’t paying thousands of dollars for YOUR ambulance ride. You’re paying for the fact that the ambulance existed to respond to your emergency in the first place. Many agencies don’t get taxpayer money, and if they do, it’s minimal. My last agency had townships paying them $2k a year to provide 24-7 ambulance service with paid providers. That doesn’t even cover fuel, let alone anything else.
Is it absolutely bullshit that people should have to be bankrupted to pay for an ambulance bill? 100% No one should have to worry about money when they’re having an emergency.
If you don’t like it, advocate for a municipal tax. If every household paid something like $75-$100 a year you could have the best EMS service with well trained, well paid providers using the best, most up to date equipment available and you would never have to worry about an ambulance bill. The places that implement those taxes generally either don’t bill at all or bill insurance and only take what insurance pays them, there’s no balance billing of the patient.
But no one wants extra taxes, even if it could save them thousands of dollars, and for some reason people come out and support funding for the fire departments and the police departments and no one wants to advocate for support and funding for EMS, so instead you get this mess where EMS is somehow expected to hold itself together and be a profitable enough business to self sustain. You end up with a system where providers are underpaid, have to work 70+ hour weeks to survive (and thus are incredibly burnt out and exhausted - you really want a provider who has worked 70 hours in 5 days on 10 hours of total sleep making life or death decisions?), the good providers head to places where they can get better pay, the equipment and ambulances are old and being held together by sheer will of the providers, and patients still have insane bills.
Patients should not fund EMS. Government should fund EMS. It’s a service, not a business, but under the current system in most places, it has to be a business if you want to be able to call 911 and have someone there to respond.
You pretty much addressed my responses to the first half of your comment in the second half.
That all sounds like reasons why the city/county/municipality/state should pay for EMS services.
People are already paying taxes, so it’s not unreasonable for them to expect the governments that they’re funding to provide the critical services that everyone needs. It’s in everyone’s interest to have a smoothly-operating EMS service that doesn’t need to be run likely a business.
Tax money already pays for police, and their budgets are already bloated as is. Why the hell can’t tax money be used to pay for all those costs of maintaining an EMS service? No one should be landed with a multi-thousand dollar bill for having a medical emergency.
Healthcare in general should run this way, but especially emergency medical services. It’s absurd that it isn’t. But too many americans are afraid of the big scary “socialism,” so they continue to let billionaire oligarchs fuck them over like this. It’s insane.
Thank you for your service and for sharing your insight.
Imagine all medicine working that way.
It does in most of Europe
Someone phone Luigi.
You are Luigi, We are all supposed to be Luigi
I’m so fascinated by the image of him having 8 downvotes while the comment calling for him by name only has 1 🤔
Maybe people think he is depicting Jesus here? I mean the heart he is pointing at with his left hand is often seen in iconic portraits of Jesus (I am not sure if it also appears in portraits of saints, but that’s not entirely relevant if the point would be whether people THOUGHT that or not)?
Oh who are we kidding, people probably just assume that the animation was generated by AI and so hate it for that reason:-P.
This would be enough to “radicalize me”, but I don’t think it’s all that radical to be against a system that treats people this way.
That’s the point, we’re not living a neutral situation, we’re under attack by bad people doing disgusting jobs
It’s us against the Epstein class, really.
It isn’t. It’s inhumane the way these companies are behaving. They’re a threat to society and this is humans’ instinctual response to eliminating threats.
We are giving thousands of dollars of our money to a company to insure that our life and health will be taken care of, it should NOT be up to these companies what methods of remedies that a person needs to be kept alive and healthy are “deemed necessary”
Furthermore; these companies CEO should NEVER be paid more than an average citizen… full stop. There’s no reason an insurance company employee owns a yacht.
average citizen
Median citizen. The average is raised significantly by a few rich folks.
Great point and an even better ultimatum.
They’re really tryna create another Luigi aren’t they?
I suspect they’ve created many.
Only one became active. Allegedly.
So far.
He was dying. This would likely have given him more time but not stopped him from dying in the near future. To an insurance company, these results are the same except that the latter case costs them more money.
You are also dying in the future. So no treatment for you. It’s even cheaper the sooner you die. And since you don’t need money after you’ve died, lets make your last days so expensive that we can extract all the money from you and if possible from the rest of your family. Profit.
Whoa whoa whoa. We can’t just let people die until we’ve extracted their economic output, up to the point where the cost of the treatment exceeds expected remaining economic output.
Hear me out… we could connect their brains to computers and keep them in a state of permanent office-hours where they fill in Excel sheets and write reports.
Death panels by any other name wouldn’t be so bleak.
Remember when the Republicans were all screaming that Obamacare was going to create death panels? Should have thought twice before giving health insurance companies ideas…
Long before the first Republican mentioned a “death panel,” private health insurance companies already had the same thing. And because Medicare was already a thing, the government also had the equivalent of death panels.
No, the truth is that “death panel” is just a scary sounding phrase and never had any real relevance. I’ve noticed that conservatives don’t use words for their meanings. They use them for how scary they sound.
That definitely tracks neuroscience’s finding that conservatives over-express fear in general. Probably one of the reasons why they cannot understand liberals.
It was unlikely the proposed treatment would have sent Tennant into full remission, but the family believed it could have bought him some more time.
Does an actual doctor believe that too?
We don’t have infinite resources to spend on treatment that won’t actually help.
This is a slop article. No actual info on success chances, prior treatments etc.
How do you think they would get treatment if no doctor believes it would help?
OH SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH YOUR “FINITE” RESOURCES BULLSHIT. The DOCTOR recommended the treatment. The only barrier to having more time with their loved one wasn’t knowledge, or skill, or reSoUCEes… It was money, a FAKE thing WE invented. You know what IS a finite resource FUCKING TIME. Our priorities as a society are so absolutely bonkers. We could have given that family more of an actual unrenewable gift that can never be replaced, restored, or generated and instead we STOLE that from them to give more of an invented thing of fictious value to the elites. Elites that have so much of it already they could never conceivable spend it.
Counter-theory: nothing got stolen, the insurance already paid a million for other treatments buying him a lot of time, but in the end the cancer won.
Now we don’t know any of that because the article is slop and doesn’t tell us anything that wouldn’t fit the sob-story narrative.
Whose money? Insurance is paid by a pool of people. That makes it a community resource and when a community members gets sick that resource should be allocated to taking care of them. People don’t pay insurance thinking “Gee I sure hope when I need coverage they deny me and direct my funds to the fatheads at the top of my insurance company.”
And the article being true/false/slop is irrelevant. Most Americans have experience with this fucked up system of ours that’s why it resonates.
OH SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH YOUR “FINITE” RESOURCES BULLSHIT.
No matter how much you scream, it will still be true. You can’t yell and curse it away.
Money is finite, even if we made it up. Everyone can’t have everything.
Amazing how a supposedly finite resource can be printed on a whim at the convenience of specific class of people.
So there is no reason, why all 300 million people in America shouldn’t get this treatment right now, in case they have cancer? All at once preferably.
If a DOCTOR (key word) diagnosis you with cancer, then YES. Otherwise, no your time would be better spent doing something else. May I suggest a hobby? Perhaps building strawmen?
Ngl, the strawman joke was pretty funny.
Your argument rests upon the inaccurate assumption that because things are what they are, that it is inevitable that they will stay the same.
You’re missing the point; everyone can have health care.
The very beginning the article:
It didn’t matter that Eric Tennant’s oncologist had recommended the medication to shrink his tumors.
The patient’s health insurance allegedly stood in the way — until it was too late.
It still sounds like this was an experimental treatment. It was brought to the doctor by the patient’s wife. So we don’t know all the specifics of how likely it would have been to help.
Even so, these kinds of experimental treatments are often paid for by the companies that provide them. There’s still a process they go through to get a “compassionate use” case approved, because they don’t have the resources to provide it to everyone who asks. I wonder if they were denied for this, if they never applied for it, or if this particular company just doesn’t offer it.
I’m not saying that US healthcare isn’t fucked or anything. Just that the situation has more nuance than the headline suggests.
I hope for your sake that boot polish isn’t a carcinogen when ingested orally.
You’re just trolling? Or your reading comprehension needs a lot of work? Or maybe you’re some kind of paranoid, living the loneliest life, because all you see are bootlickers everywhere. I genuinely don’t know which one it is.
Mangione did nothing wrong.
What’s wrong with getting McDonald’s after playing video games?
Succulent american meal?
Mototov the fuck
I’ll never understand how people were OK with putting middlemen with an interest in denying care between them and lifesaving treatment.
The Acquired podcast went over this history very briefly in their Epic episode and it’s so crazy how close we were to having universal healthcare.
Tl;dl:
- during WW2, wage controls were in place due to a large demand of workers but very few people available due to being in the war
- unions and companies alike were looking for ways to make their positions and companies more attractive.
- government permitted benefits to augment salaries. Some companies started offering health insurance.
- back then going to the doctor was NOT the bankrupt causing thing that is today and was considered a fringe benefit
- larger companies were able to offer better incentives due to healthcare benefits
- add a few years of corruption and “market forces” and you have the system we have now
So blame wage controls during WW2.
Oh and the Brits were facing similar forces when they were starting to stand up their healthcare system but decided instead to hire people to build a robust system so everyone didn’t have to pay anything at the point of sale.
Yeah, it really was that simple.
I prefer to blame the people who take advantage of the sick
Universal healthcare is one of those things that’s not only tricky to set up but also to keep going. Here in the UK, yep the NHS is amazing. But it’s also terribly underfunded - despite taking over 10% of GDP (IIRC) we still have long waiting lists, and healthcare staff are overworked and underpaid. Greedy vermin are constantly looking for opportunities to privatise it, the only reason this hasn’t already happened is that it would be hugely unpopular. I’m pretty sure almost everyone in the country would prefer more taxes be spent on the NHS and maybe a bit less on, say, fossil fuel subsidies - but here we are. Still, it’s one of the few things our country can actually be proud of.
I wouldn’t say it’s tricky to keep going. Keeping it going is simply a case of funding it.
Now, repairing the damage of years of underfunding? That’s tricky
the only reason long waiting lists don’t exist in the us is because some people just are not getting the things they need done at all. Even people with insurance you often can’t find a specialist who takes it and the insurance denies things like in the article. The wait is very long when its impossible to get the treatment at all.
add a few years of corruption and “market forces” and you have the system we have now
Sir you are being shareholder-phobic
/s
because apparently, the alternative is communism, and it will have death panels that will decide if you get to live in order to save costs…
Insurance is worse than communism in this case.
Tax paid universal healthcare and healthcare insurance both work on the idea of socializing the cost.
The difference is that insurance companies also need to make a profit too feed the owners. Since they don’t actually produce anything that can make a profit, the only place they can grab the “profit” is by denying cover.
American healthcare insurance is exactly the same picture that is shown when people try to explain why communism doesn’t work.
Nearly everything is better than the US&A’s take on capitalism.
Insurance companies are deathpanels though…
that was my point.
they prefer real material death panels, than the alternative, because it might have theoretical death panels. that no country with public healthcare has.
The danger of commenting first thing after waking up!
same, haven’t got my coffee yet, how do you take yours?
deleted by creator
here you go.
☕
I believe that was their point…
Well maybe they are private enterprise death panels, but they trust them more than theoretical government death panels because the private sector is more efficient than government at cutting costs, such as, um, actually paying for needed care and oh shit they did not think that through.
edit: I meant to reply that to the comment above, but oh well. It’s here now.
thanks Reagan
Well, capitalists own the government that made this possible and they know a gap in the market when they see one…
Removed by mod
Someone close to them might just turn in Luigi one day. Good job.
I checked this article and the NBC one linked in the NY Post article, and they didn’t name the insurer? What the fuck are they holding water for this shitty company for?
In the NY Post linked article:
Per KFF, the late Tennant was insured by the Public Employees Insurance Agency of West Virginia, which partners with UnitedHealthcare. (The Post reached out to both agencies for comment.)
I’m an idiot. Thank you!
Was he Republican?
