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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (40460)	6/14/1999 1:57:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 108807

do you see any way of ensuring that people who are not insured or millionaires have access to reasonable quality health care? We are moving more and more toward assuring that people who cannot afford insurance or private pay are covered by government insurance programs - primarily Medicare and Medicaid, but also Champus, etc. The system is not perfect. Those programs may need to be expanded. But we must also be aware that NO system is perfect. No matter what the system, you can produce anecdotal evidence of people who fell through the cracks. Even if every census tract in the country (the best way of dividing up the country into roughly equivalent and definable population sectors) had a hospital and clinic just for that tract fully paid for at government expense, which of course would be exhorbitantly expensive, some people would still not get adequate care. We certainly can make improvements in our system. But I think it works remarkably well for a remarkably large number of people. The question is whether we accept that some people will get better care than others, or try to assure that everybody receives identical care, which means that most people's medical care will degrade significantly.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (40460)	6/14/1999 10:13:00 PM
From: E	Respond to of 108807

I feel just as you do about our health care system not being adequate for everyone, or even for nearly everyone. We joined Kaiser Permanente over ten years ago. We liked it very much at first, and a number of our friends joined on the basis of our reports. It's no longer the same place. To fill a prescription, if you want to use their pharmacy (where the co-pay for a prescription is only $5.) instead of paying the full price at an outside pharmacy, you may have to wait there among the coughing multitudes for two hours. I feel very uneasy about the quality of the health care we would receive if either of us were sick, and I know many others who feel the same way. And none of us felt this way ten years ago. I don't know what this means.