Pete, None of it is true. There are plenty of minorities at Panorama City - my local Kaiser. When Gwen was transferred to Los Angeles Kaiser, it seemed to me that most of the patients were minorities.
A lot of unions are members of Kaiser and the service accepts them all, as far as I know. They pay a lot less than I do (as a private subscriber) for everything. Now for some brutal truth about health care. There has to be rationing of treatment. Otherwise, every health service would collapse. In Canada, people get insurance policies to pay for a trip across the border for procedures the Canadian Health Service cannot afford. As it is, I understand that they run out of money toward the end of the year. They ration, without doubt, as does the British system. Otherwise the substance of the service would be drained by terribly ill patients. There comes a time when no more should be done. It boils down, sooner or later, to whether to spend $100,000 dollars trying to keep an old person alive - or to spend the money on 20 young people to make the rest of their lives fruitful. All health services have to ration. That's the brutal truth. When I entered Kaiser with my family 40 years ago, we paid $3 to see a doctor. It's now $20. However, if he has to pass you on to specialists, or technical examinations, it costs no more. They use a lot more nurse practitioners now, which reduces costs. If an NP finds you have a more serious problem, the doctor is there to see you immediately. Appointments are made in the morning and I rarely wait longer than a few minutes. Should your doctor be away, you can see another . As I've previously said, I called Wednesday afternoon to say there was a sore that didn't seem to get well. I saw my doctor Thursday morning. He sent me immediately to specialists who ordered an operation. I spent the rest of the afternoon seeing the anesthesiologist, nurses, surgeon - and even a short film to explain how it was done. Monday morning I had the operation. It was cancerous. I've told you that they will no longer pay most proprietary prescriptions. If you have to pay the high prices, you keep your receipts and after you reach your co-payment limit (I think it's $3,000) Kaiser takes over. Most prescriptions are generic and their standard cost is $10 for 100 days of treatment. I think a long time ago, they were $3 or so. Biggest change is a cost for entering hospital that wasn't there before. Also, I think you get charged $50 for emergency - if you aren't admitted to hospital. I don't think they get the problem Keith mentioned where people call an ambulance to get a free ride into town, or something. By carefully calculating costs, Kaiser manages to provide first-class service at reasonable premiums. Not as good as Congress gets, I'm sure, but plenty good enough for the person with a modest income. It's run by doctors and they try to run a good hospital service. I think they succeed. To give you an idea of cost, a single person in his middle 50s will pay $266 a month as a private subscriber. If you are enrolled as a member of a union or suchlike, you will pay much less. However, Pete, your post positively exudes dislike of a private system. I would suspect that you would be against it even if it were the best system around - purely because it is private. Before the Kaiser, in Ontario, I used the private PSI (Physicians, Surgeons, Inc) for doctor service and Blue Cross for hospital service. It was excellent and we even received doctor visits to our home. It wasn't expensive, but was very good. I suppose it has disappeared into the Canadian Health Service, But you wouldn't have liked PSI. Harry -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of pete Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 5:34 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Futurework] Private health care (was E.European...) On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Why do you see the private sector is terrible at healthcare? I've >already described the Kaiser-Permanente system, which I would say was >the equal of any other in the world - private or government. Is that perhaps because they can cherry pick their clientele among those who qualify? How would they fare if they weren't allowed to reject any applicant due to preexisting conditions, or charge them impossibly high premiums? Say if the only allowable cause for a targeted premium rate hike was willful indulgence in high risk activity like smoking? Don't you think under those circumstances they would either close up shop or degrade their service to levels much worse than public systems? What are the numbers like for these issues? And then of course there's the "auto-selection" provided by the private premium system: only those who can afford the premiums enroll, so the client base is pre-sorted for more affluent people who will generally be in better health, having had better nutrition and better self-image (I'm sure you've seen the stats correlating health with _relative_ income), and had more prompt attention to any health issues they may have confronted. A real health care system must look after the whole population, not just the upper sixty percent who can manage the premiums. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
