Choosing between education and health care - this country is nuts.

LApatriotmom: I don't think there is any easy answer to the real problem that you highlight and there have been some - many - people, are just too poor to afford adequate health insurance coverage.

 

You are still missing my point. When a person is very poor and can't afford 'adequate' health insurance there is STATE insurance. Medicaid, etc. I don't know of any poor person's child not going to the doctor due to lack of insurance. They are usually covered right from birth. A person must go down to the local offices and submit proof of income (or lack thereof) get the benefits started.

Anyway, done with this topic.

 

Actually, preventative health care is something Canada's health insurance does very well. It's far better to get folks in when it's still a "little sniffle", and cheap to treat, than after it's turned into walking pneumonia and requires hospitalization or expensive drugs to save their life.

The United States actually spend MORE on Health Care, despite having a "for profit" system, than any other industrialized country. http://www.cfr.org/health-science-and-technology/healthcare-costs-us-competitiveness/p13325

When my children have ear infections, I'm good to wait three days and use Auralgan (pain-killing ear drops) to see if they go away on their own, as ear infections often do. However, Auralgan isn't available over the counter down in the US where my relatives live. Why not? Because apparently (as a friend in the US medical profession explained to me) Americans can't be trusted to administer their own pain-killers to their kids. If the kid isn't in severe pain, the parents won't bring them in to be seen by a doctor. They're too afraid of the cost of medical treatment. So the ear infection will go untreated, and the kid will end up deaf.

I'm sure that's not true for all (or even most!) American parents, but apparently that was the logic behind making Auralgan prescription-only in the US. (In at least one state, anyway.)

 

Perhaps before you leave entirely you might take a look at this...

Children Without Health Insurance: http://www.census.gov/prod/3/98pubs/cenbr981.pdf

It's from your own Census Bureau and says, "The data shows that the number of American children without health coverage rose from 8.2 million to 10.6 million from 1987 to 1996, overall a period of relative prosperity." (Later it says the percentage rose from 12.9 percent to 14.8 percent of the under-18 population.)

Fact: Almost 1 in 4 poor children lacked health insurance in 1996.

 

The sad thing is that many of times it is not because there are not programs out there that could help it is because the parents do not avail themselves of the programs. I will say though that some states offer more than others but that is their right since we are a confederation of states. I also do not necessarily trust the statistics most of the time since you really can manuver data to say almost anything, then you have to look at your sample and your margin of error..... too many variables especially in government funded stats.

 

MegCanada:

Yes, this is the kind of thing I was thinking about generally.

Unfortunately it is very widespread.