Before vaccines, the alternative was quarantines which is an extreme mandate. Ok there was an alternative: let the disease spread and kill off enough people until we achieved herd immunity. What we seem to have lost is the concept of public health or of societal responsibility. Add in a disregard for science and we get Robert Kennedy Jr. who a) has no good data and b) what data he cites is correlation without causation. The so-called science behind his claim that vaccines cause autism is a prime example. Without data and only repeatedly debunked science, the anti-vaxxers rely on repetition of inaccuracies. Unfortunately the key to effective advertising is repetition.
This is the US health system
- Thread starter watu05
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I don’t know anyone who is happy with the state of healthcare in this country. Except possibly the politicians who keep cashing the checks from the industry lobbyist
Medicare is not free. It requires monthly premiums and co-pays. Medicare Advantage which was added to allow private insurance companies to participate costs about $80B a year more than conventional Medicare. Expect Trump to try shift more people to Medicare Advantage.
VA is not alternative for most vets. Two years of service only gets one care in special circumstance such as a service caused disability. IOW two years of service is not a gateway to a life of free medical care.
Yeah, it took my friend several years to prove his service caused disability while in the Navy. It was obvious it was service caused, but it took him six years.
This corruption has largely gone unpunished (the Sacklers kept 1/2 of their wealth and didn't got to jail) and continues today.
Lol. The Sacklers of the world aren’t the major problem. It’s the corruption which exists among our elected leaders and healthcare industry which needs to be addressed.
Yeah, both classes of individuals in the system need to be attended to, but the dirty cops need to be busted first and foremost.(elected officials) Chicken and the egg though, they certainly won't police themselves.
The original Wakefield paper that people used to cite from the Lancet about the autism-vaccine link always confused the hell out of me as a scientist.
The autism link was speculative at best even as written. If I recall correctly, it was based on data from the paper about how vaccines might affect gut health and then how gut health in turn might have something to do with triggering autism. It was speculative and while there was some initial data presented indicating a correllation, there was no clear pathway and it was presented as a hypothesis that should be looked at in the future, not as a definitive conclusion on a causal pathway for autism expression.
Hypotheses get posited and debunked all the time, sometimes some zany stuff.
His co-authors gradually withdrew support for the major findings of the paper, and it turned out Wakefield either falsified or cherry picked the data that led him to speculate on that link in the first place. He was stripped of his medical license and not a single major follow up study has ever come close to replicating his results.
You can usually find an academic paper or two, often in a reputable journal, saying almost anything you'd like. The question isn't "Can I find a paper or two linking mountain biking with brain cancer?" or "Might climate change be natural instead of man-made?" The answer is almost definitely yes. The questions is, "What do the bulk of scientific papers looking at the relation between XYZ and various cancer types show, and how statistically significant are those results?" Just like polling, sometimes you get wonky samples and erroneous results without bad faith.
The shame of it is that environmental triggers for expressing latent autism are poorly understood, and the medical research community spent an inordinate amount of time trying to replicate and then debunking Wakefield's study instead of exploring other causes.
Damn, you got me. I stand corrected.
Man, how embarrassing for me. Sorry for the above post, guys. I'll try to just post memes from mommy blogs from now on.
Medicare is single-payer medicine. it's okay to call it socialist medicine.
People just don't think it is because they get to go to most of the doctors and hospitals in the US.
People just don't think it is because they get to go to most of the doctors and hospitals in the US.
It's the same damn way with socialist medical systems in Europe. You always pay for it. In the Soviet Union workers paid for it with their taxes.
It's a single provider paid for with taxes. That makes it socialist. You don't spend your earnings after tax on it, and there is only one provider. (the government) Once again, that makes it socialist.
It's a single provider paid for with taxes. That makes it socialist. You don't spend your earnings after tax on it, and there is only one provider. (the government) Once again, that makes it socialist.
it's community. people sharing a common benefit thaty have paid for.
Socialism is when gov pays the bill.
That's [the definition of socialism. What a dunderhead. Where do you think the government gets the money to pay a common benefit?
So what is "socialist" about it and if so why is that (often misused label) bad? I pick my own docs and hospitals, I pay a monthly premium, I engage a private insurance company to run my care if I want (I don't). Presumably I get a price break from the money deducted from my wages over the years, so? What's the big deal? The AMA opposed Medicare back in the day, but now supports it.
Amazon has an extremely high P/E, so why would it want to get into providing healthcare? Presumably they believe that they can run so 'efficiently' that they can earn higher profits and rapidly expand their customer base.. Here's an example of what that looks like. Doctors running tele-visits from their cars?
Salary, ot, vacation, pto, 401ks, stock purchase plans, Health Insurance, ... are all part or an employee's compensation package.
Cool story.
When I lived near the border in both Tucson and San Diego, I knew of plenty of people that went down to Mexico to get dental procedures, cheaper prescription drugs, and other medical care.
By your logic, is Mexico's health care better than either Canada or the US?
Makes sense that the only people who can seem to get health care in this country are elderly foreigners related to expat medical practitioners….
