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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (2883)	11/13/2007 7:49:16 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 42652

<<<15% aren't currently covered by insurance, but many of them are either people who qualify for government provided insurance but are healthy and haven't bothered to sign up yet, or people who are easily wealthy enough to afford insurance and just decide not to buy it. Both groups would have to be subtracted out from any calculation of people who don't have access to our health care system>>> If you subtract (try it by guessing at the numbers) all those that you do not consider to be uninsured and what you have left is an alarmingly large number of people. Just the number of veterans and their family alone that are not insured (according to a new study)is a very, very large number. The new study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, estimated that in 2004 nearly 1.8 million veterans were uninsured and unable to get care in veterans’ facilities. An additional 3.8 million members of their households faced the same predicament. All told, this group made up roughly 12 percent of the huge population of uninsured Americans. Most of the uninsured veterans were working-class people who were too poor to afford private insurance but not poor enough to qualify for care under a priority system administered by the Veterans Affairs Department. Some were unable to get care because there was no V.A. facility nearby, or the nearest facility had a long waiting list, or they could not afford the co-payments required of some veterans. <<< (And of course everyone has some access to the system, but I can understand why you don't consider being able to use emergency rooms as "access to the best health care system in the world.)>>> Yes, because when you are uninsured and enter the emergency room - they only diagnose your problem. If you are not insured and do not qualifify for medicaid you still have to pay the doctor and hospital bills. Hospital stays routinely cost $1000's per day for even very common treatment. That could very easily cause you to go bankrupt.