by "djmt1" (djmt1)
Published 02/01/2017 at 17:02
by "djmt1" (djmt1)
Published 02/01/2017 at 17:02
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Let’s have a chat about “Health Tourism”.
So I’m here watching a BBC series about the NHS and boy is it depressing. Today’s program is about those “bloody foreigners coming over ‘ere and taking our healthcare for free”. As a tax payer, I find health tourism to be absolutely infuriating especially given that my local hospital has the second highest unpaid bills in the country. However I do hold a lot of pride that our doctors will treat you regardless of your financial situation. Urgh, talk about being stuck between a rock and hard place. So what say you Oppo? How do you nip a problem like health tourism?
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
02/01/2017 at 17:07, STARS: 1
The health system I work for is actively encouraging it. however, we do ask that you pay for it. The idea of our goal is to get costs down and outcomes up such that it becomes enticing to be treated here, which overall brings costs down further through higher utilization.
"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
02/01/2017 at 17:07, STARS: 0
By encouraging other countries to provide their own healthcare. By being an active player in the world. I took my son to the ER a couple of years ago because he fell and hit his head. The waiting room was full of people with colds, flus, and other mundane ailments. It finally struck me how, for so many people, the ER is their family doctor.
"Berang" (berang)
02/01/2017 at 17:08, STARS: 0
Build a wall to keep those Americans out.
"djmt1" (djmt1)
02/01/2017 at 17:10, STARS: 0
So are they paying for it before or after the work is done?
"For Sweden" (rallybeetle)
02/01/2017 at 17:10, STARS: 1
Bruh if you don’t charge the foreigners that’s your fault
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
02/01/2017 at 17:11, STARS: 1
They aren’t going to charge you up front, but they are going to verify your ability to pay for it via insurance.
"crowmolly" (crowmolly)
02/01/2017 at 17:11, STARS: 2
This is one of the reasons you may have noticed a rise in urgent care providers. Places that will handle a stomach bug, flu, physical, etc but are not a full blown ER like you’d go to for nasty accident.
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
02/01/2017 at 17:11, STARS: 2
The ER being a family doc is a HUGE problem and one of the biggest reasons healthcare is expensive.
"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
02/01/2017 at 17:12, STARS: 2
If everybody had health insurance, that wouldn’t happen. Oh, wait....
"djmt1" (djmt1)
02/01/2017 at 17:13, STARS: 2
Maybe we have been too subtle about how great the NHS is.
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
02/01/2017 at 17:14, STARS: 1
The trouble, like so many things, is that its a small portion of the population, ruining it for the rest of us. Granted, a lot of people are forced down this road by their deductibles and co-pays or lack of insurance generally, but yeah.
"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein)
02/01/2017 at 17:16, STARS: 1
When a country provides a safety net for its people, that safety net is bound to be taken advantage of. You can take steps to minimize the abuse but it’s never going to be eliminated.
So either you accept that providing that safety net is a good thing and abuse is the cost of doing business, or you fight against continuing to provide the safety net.
"For Sweden" (rallybeetle)
02/01/2017 at 17:24, STARS: 3
“Hi I’d like to see a physician this week.”
“I’m sorry, our next opening is in three months.”
That’s why you go to the ER.
"For Sweden" (rallybeetle)
02/01/2017 at 17:27, STARS: 0
That’s how everyone feels until their local clinic is merged with another clinic.
"facw" (facw)
02/01/2017 at 17:32, STARS: 2
Here most of the urgent care places seem to be tightly affiliated with insurers, which is not surprising considering how much your insurer does not want you to go to the ER.
That said I think they are pretty bad options. I’d much rather use ZocDoc/whatever to find a primary care doc with good availability
"Chinny Raccoon" (chinnyraccoon)
02/01/2017 at 17:43, STARS: 3
It’s not that concerning to me- the cost is overall a very small amount of the NHS budget. Also for EU citizens it’s a reprocical agreement, UK citizens can access the same healthcare as a citizen of another european country while they are there. Lots of retired types in Spain who are going to be needing healthcare .
I get the feeling that a lot of effort is being put in to ‘othering’- “Look at all these foreigners stealing your money”, when the budgets are being squeezed as a result of underfunding. The cynical part of me suspects that this is part of an ongoing privatisation drive to adopt a US style insurance model, which would ensure a lot more money for the right people. Not the people needing care though.
"crowmolly" (crowmolly)
02/01/2017 at 17:48, STARS: 1
Oh, absolutely. A PCP is way better in the long run. But for minor stuff urgent care can be OK.
"Xyl0c41n3" (i-am-xyl0c41n3)
02/01/2017 at 18:11, STARS: 0
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
Othering is exactly right. And blaming the entirety of a nation’s woes on immigrants is a tried and true tactic to accomplish exactly that. Immigrants are the easiest targets. Often, they have a different culture than the predominant one within a country. They may not speak the language, they look different, they might be a different religion, and they are rarely given similar caliber legal protections as full-fledged citizens — all of that wraps up into a tidy package which makes it extremely easy to sell to your fellow countrymen as the reason X ails you.
You don’t have a job? It’s because the immigrants are taking them.
You have issues with your healthcare? It’s because immigrants are taxing the already overburdened system, both in terms of taking up providers’ resources and time, and in the State’s expenditures in funding that care.
There’s crime anywhere in your country? It’s because immigrants are criminals.
Your public education system not performing as well as you would like? It’s because immigrants are taking up room in the classroom, and since they are academic underachievers it makes good teachers leave from frustration.
Your post-secondary schools cost too much? It’s because immigrants come here and get a free ride.
The economy is tanking? It’s because immigrants are sending too many dollars/(insert currency here) out of circulation by sending them to their home countries via remittances.
Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
And none of it is true. But that doesn’t matter, because everyone wants someone to blame. And oh, how easy it is to blame he who is different from you.
"gmporschenut also a fan of hondas" (gmporschenut)
02/01/2017 at 21:38, STARS: 1
Issue up until recently was that the ER was the only place open on weekends.
"gmporschenut also a fan of hondas" (gmporschenut)
02/01/2017 at 21:42, STARS: 0
1% of patients cost 20% of all dollars
5% account for 50% of all spending.
Heath care is extremely lopsided with 95% of the population of the US running on 50% of the cost. .
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
02/01/2017 at 22:34, STARS: 0
yup. the nice way to call them is “high utilizers” and they are frequent ER users primarily.
"gmporschenut also a fan of hondas" (gmporschenut)
02/01/2017 at 22:43, STARS: 0
According to one study (Banarto, McClellan, Kagy and Garber, 2004), 30% of all Medicare expenditures are attributed to the 5% of beneficiaries that die each year
"BiTurbo228 - Dr Frankenstein of Spitfires" (biturbo228)
02/02/2017 at 08:43, STARS: 1
Working in the more strategic part of the NHS as I do, I can tell you that people absolutely know that this is one of the major issues with the acute and primary care systems.
There’s major work afoot (which will likely take bloody ages, but it’s happening) to join up working between the primary care and acute sectors to try and get people out of the ER who don’t need to be there.
It’s only one teeny-tiny piece of the puzzle of course, but stuff is genuinely happening!
"BiTurbo228 - Dr Frankenstein of Spitfires" (biturbo228)
02/02/2017 at 08:59, STARS: 1
Personally, I think that it’s a hot-topic that gets an inflated coverage in the news because railing against ‘bloody foreigners’ is apparently a thing in the 21st century, rather than discussing the things that are actually driving our healthcare system into the ground.
1. Stop using it as a political football. The NHS needs strong direction and a level playing field in order to fix itself. Stop changing the goalposts halfway through a 5-10yr change programme so all the previous work is pointless.
2. Lack of investment in capital and change. The NHS needs to change significantly in order to survive into the future. However, because the government have thrown a hissy-fit about how much the NHS costs (despite renewing Trident), a great deal of the development budget for future service changes has been sucked away. The NHS needs to reconfigure in order to save money, but in order to reconfigure it needs upfront capital. Without the upfront capital, it can’t rationalise services to save money, so you just end up stripping stuff away that ends up being detrimental to actually treating sick people.
3. Educate the public about how the NHS works, or change the accessibility of the NHS to improve how the public filter through it. Now, the NHS is mind-bogglingly complex, and being sick is scary, so I don’t blame the public at all for getting it wrong a lot of the time. NHS 111 was intended to be a first port of call for advice when people aren’t sure. It’s proved useful, but not as much as is required. Really, it should be the gateway to all NHS services (and improved in scope and budget to cope with providing that service). Basically be a triage system for the entirety of the NHS.
There’s a whole list of other important things to sort out in the NHS, such as understaffing forcing reliance on exorbitant agency staff to fill vacancies.
Basically, there’s about a billion other things to do before ‘health tourism’ becomes in any which way the biggest problem the NHS has to tackle. It’s being discussed purely because it gets the uneducated masses all frothing at the mouth, and that makes for a good news article.