YAY CANADIAN HEALTHCARE! Fuck you americans that think universal healthcare is bad! :D

1) Canadians are Americans. There are two whole continents known as the Americas.

2) That's a gross generalization, as it seems like you're saying that everyone in the US hates the thought of universal health care, which I and my mates certainly don't.

That said.. Lapin, I wish your father a speedy recovery, and hope you can figure out exactly what caused this so it can be prevented in the future.

1) ..... I'm just not gonna touch that powder keg.

2) I agree with you. It honestly baffles me that people would be against it. I can't think of any good reason why people would think otherwise.

Also, thanks. :3

Item 2: It's not that they're against universal healthcare...they're just greedy bastards and don't want to pay anything for it. If it's going to cost them more money, they're against it. If it'll make them more money (like not paying as much in taxes), they're all for it.

The amusing thing is that the government portion of health care spending in the US works out to more money spent per capita than is spent by governments in Canada. All while giving worse care to a smaller portion of the population.

If you include government spending on purchasing health insurance for government employees, US government spending on health care is greater, (again on a per capita basis), than Canadian health care spending in total.

You think it might be because US health care costs more?

Didn't I just say that US health care costs more?

If you are wondering if "US health care costs more to provide" remember that Canadian doctors and hospitals pay similar costs for equipment and most supplies. Neither are there huge differences in pay.

American doctors are greedy bastards.
They will do anything up to and including giving out harmful prescriptions and perfoming unnecessary( or even harmful!) surgery.
This is coming from someone who lost three grandparents to the money-honey jackasses.

Some lawyers might disagree with you in the form of a frivolous lawsuit. I bet Canada doesn't have those. Based on what I've read of the Canadian history and law, it has five states that follow the queen, while the others don't have to. Every other state may treat healthcare differently. There are plenty of differing testimonials. There are plenty of doctors to chose from, unfortunately bad ones can stretch for miles. You almost have to go out of your territory. And Jasper gains that spending money from a 15% sales tax, if I do recall.... but my interest was BC.

1) You are a wiser man than most, Beau.

2) There's a lot of US indoctrination and litany against "socialized medicine" and the insinuation of socialism. It ultimately comes down to the people in charge trying to trick the voters into voting against their best interests.

What Yamato said. It's the old prejudiced against communism just not dying. The people who are in charge were raised to believe that anything communist or socialist was unamerican. It's ingrained into their nature, so they just feel it's wrong and no amount of 'logic' or 'evidence' is going to make them think otherwise. It's not until people get into office that don't have that indoctrination that there will be a decent chance of the drug maker's stranglehold on medicine gets broken.

It's not so much against it as the proposed options have been less than stellar. Everyone gets a 5% income tax increase as well as various deductions get the boot, irregardless of whether or not you already have health insurance. So, to someone like me that has health insurance through my college, I'd be paying for those that don't have health insurance(and no, there weren't proposed cuts for college students or low-income families to cut the tax).

Now sure, that may sound selfish and greedy, but seriously, I've set myself up well in my life and have good job prospects for when I leave college. Why the fuck should I pay for the health insurance of all the douche bags that decided they were going out to party on Friday nights, getting drunk, smoking pot, reminiscing about the days when they could get away with practically anything because they were on the football team, and saying "fuck college, woohoo!" while I bust my ass to keep my grades up and make up what I don't get in scholarship with a part-time job? Because it "contributes to society"? Because I should be personally responsible for the assholes that shoved me in lockers and wouldn't give two shits about me today if they passed me in the street? Well pardon my French, but fuck that with a giant, rusty spoon.

Thanks for deciding that all of us poor people are lazy or stupid. No of course no one is born into a situation that is exceptionally difficult to pull out of because the well off spend large sums of money keeping it that way. No one is stuck in a situation beyond their control or has to help their family because they actually have some kind of sense of honor to them and thus tanks a situation that hurts their prospects f or the future. Nope, we all just party and have unprotected sex while listening to rap music played on $20,000 stereos in $1000 cars, and we all live on welfare and come to your house to ask for cups of sugar for out meth labs.

Tl;dr: Go fuck yourself you overly entitled prick.

To address point #2, no, that is not what I said. Reading comprehension FTW. I am saying "fuck you" to the people that think universal health care is bad. I am not saying all US citizens think universal health care is bad.

And really? No, Canadians are most certainly NOT americans. Ask anyone NOT living in the USA if they consider themselves "American". Ask 100 people, you'll get 100 resounding "NO!"s. There's a world of difference between "America" and "North/South America". To obfuscate this fact like you did is just being plainly obtuse, and everyone can see right through your "argument" (for lack of a better term)

I'm a Type 1 diabetic with some other auto-immune diseases. My healthcare costs are astronomical. I'd KILL for universal healthcare in the States

No kidding. I got extremely ill once, and the doctor prescribed me a medicine that would've taken care of it in just two or three days. It was $750 AFTER insurance (well over $1,000 before). Needless to say, I didn't get it and just suffered for over two weeks...

On the other hand, is it any better to charge everyone a higher rate of taxes to cover the cost of other people's stupidity? And at that point, everything becomes the governments business, from what you eat, to your hobbies, to everything that might create a cost to the healthcare system.

Dad is an active senior, plays sports frequently, doesn't smoke, has low cholesterol from a relatively healthy diet, has not had any warning whatsoever about this attack, and is the ideal weight for his age.

So how is a heart attack the result of his "stupidity?" How is someone with autism a result of their own stupidity? How is CANCER a result of someone's stupidity?

People don't WANT to be sick or dying. And to deny them treatment so you can destroy their QUALITY of life by taking all their money... is simply bogus. :(

But that's the last I'll say about that.

Whoa, I didn't mean your dad! He does sound healthy, and it's unfortunate that something like this would randomly pop up, but that's what insurance is for.

What I have against a socialized healthcare system is that not only would I be required to pay for your dad's healthcare, but I'd be required to pay to take care of the guy who tried to drink a gallon of gasoline, the guy who eats a bag of corn chips, a can of tuna, and a jar of mayonaise, chronic smokers, alchoholics, people doing "stunts" for YouTube, all of them. And I'd be stuck having to pay at least as high of an insurance rate as they are.

The problem with this argument is we are already in this position. One of the requirements for a hospital ER to be considered an Emergency Room (IE ambulances can deliver there) is that life-saving treatment is always provided, regardless of the patient's ability to pay. Part of the reason for this is so that if you fall unconscious they don't let you die because you don't have a huge wad of cash or insurance card on you at the time.

The problem with this requirement is that being in the ER (worse, the OR due to trauma) is the most expensive medical treatment you can receive, minute for minute. And because of the above, everyone will always receive this treatment (so long as they live long enough to get to the ER). Sure the hospital will do its best to try to collect this money, but this is why medical bankruptcy is such an issue. And that money still needs to come from somewhere, so it ends up coming from everyone else via higher to both the patients and to insurance (who pass it on as higher premiums).

So long as we have the 'they don't check your wallet in the ER' rule, we have socialized medicine in the USA, period. The problem is that form is about the worse, most expensive overall form possible. So the question is do we keep things as they are, do we make it more efficient by helping more people get cheaper care, or do we install a gate at the ER (and really, it would need to be before the ambulance is dispatched as well) and only let someone through if they can prove they can pay for treatment before treatment is rendered.

My biggest problem isn't with ER treatment, believe it or not, and 0bamacare does nothing to fix that. But saying that we should have to pay for everyone is hardly the answer to the problem of how we afford to pay for everyone.

What drives up the cost is that, with insurance covering as much as it does, people tend to not shop around, at all. In fact, if you've ever tried to call somewhere to ask for a quote for regular care, which is pretty much how every single other industry operates, very few places can give you one, or won't give you one. And because of these, you can have people paying (via insurance) $3000 for a $600 procedure without knowing the difference. So when an insurance company is having to pay five times what a procedure normally costs for the same thing, they end up having to charge more to the customers.

Actually, the reverse is what ends up happening. Starting with Medicare/Medicaid, these services dictate the cost, both what medicare will pay and what extra the paint can be held liable for. This is set standard country wide, modified only by NOT having these rates cut even more due to poor patient survey scores or other factors. Other insurance companies work similarly, though they tend not to be able to negotiate prices quite as well (given for my hospital, for example, Medicare is something like 70% or more of our patients). No matter what hospital A or hospital B, or surgeon C or surgeon D want to charge for that triple bypass, Medicare pays the same amount and everyone had better be happy with what they get.

You may have a point solely when it comes to someone who is uninsured receiving healthcare, and there indeed prices tend to be both far higher and much more varied from one clinic or hospital to another. Part of what drives that though is that the uninsured will almost exclusively only receive healthcare as a last resort (in part because of this very expense).

I will agree that Obamacare does not go very far in terms of helping to "pay for everyone", though there will be cost reduction due to getting everyone insured (it's an unfortunate reality that the ER policy listed above means that the uninsured will often use the ER as a family clinic, going in for a simple cold, which they would have gone to a GP if they'd been insured and thus could see the doctor). The problem there is when you look at how health insurance is currently handled in America, specifically who is covered by the government and who is on their own.

Government:
Medicare : the elderly
Medicaid : poor, unable to afford insurance
VA : Soldiers wounded physically or mentally often in ways inconceivable to happen in civilian life

Public Insurance:
Everyone else : IE, those that in theory can pay, and unlikely to have limbs missing from IEDs, and are not reaching the natural end of life. In short, the cheap ones.

Basically as it is public insurance gets to insure everyone that's (relatively) cheap to ensure and is minimal risk. The expensive, and high risk patients, they're all covered by the government. so of course the insurance industry loves this, and the government expenses are huge. If the government also covered everyone age 7-25, the cost per covered patient would drop drastically. And if the government got in extra taxes all the money currently paid to private health insurance, and also had to cover all citizens, the system would actually be financially stable currently. But it's not a politically acceptable option to go that route, so instead the question is how we make things least awful.

How can the US afford to pay for everyone?

Switch to a socialized or single payer model, they cost _LESS_ than what US governments are already doing.

A note on this: If our health care could be like France and Canada, that would be awesome. But US Government health care plan is a bad mutation of that awesome idea. They've hidden other agendas in the health care package. Even placed an internet SOPA/CISPA style act in the first attempt. What does internet access of media have to do with health care? See how our US idiocy [government officials] takes great ideas and rapes them into half of what they should be and add the other half with hidden agenda. [My opinion of course, so no flaming.]

I more or less agree: pharmaceutical companies can pretty much charge anything that they want for drugs that are considered essential to maintaining or improving patient health. It's a very lucrative but ugly practice in those respects.

To mangle a quote a magazine article I read today about US healthcare: "Medical insurance isn't really insurance. You wouldn't use your car insurance to do a tune up, so why would you use your health insurance to get a diagnosis?"

Actually, there are car insurance programs that cover maintenance. However, they are almost always more expensive than just saving your money and paying for regular repairs and maintenance yourself, as they have to cover the cost plus the additional cost of administration and support, advertising, and then still have enough left over to make a profit.

The pigs in blue are greedy fuckers.

*huggles softly* hes getting better. After something like its best to take one step at a time

My dad had a slight blockage in one of his femoral arteries. But because he always used to be in such good shape his body was all like "Fuck that shit!" and built a new artery around the blockage! O_o
Unfortunately that "natural bypass" wasn't growing fast enough so they had to operate afterall.

Anyway, I hope your dad is gonna recover completely soon! :3 He seems like a total trooper, I'm sure it won't take him long to recover! X3

I'm so glad to hear that you have had some good news. I'll keep you in my prayer for the bad *hugs*

Hope your dad will be able have his free time again

Glad for the good, meh for the bad. Best of luck from me to you and your familia.

"But for some reason, his heart rate just won't go below 75. It beats faster than it should, and they're trying to find out why."

Well, I have two possible theories for this, both of which could be hand in hand with one another:
1) His heart is simply used to beating more. With an artery that was so badly clogged it would've had to have adjusted to try and make up the difference for the lack of oxygen that his cells demanded.
2) His heart has been damaged in such a way that it is somehow making it beat harder, due to the muscle constraint which would also lead to higher blood pressure. Hypertension (or at least many forms of it) will usually make the heart beat faster.

Buuuut I'm just a pharmacy technician. In any event I'm glad to hear your fathers' health and well being has actually seemed to have -improved- since this instance and I certainly hope that he'll be alright. :3

I love you used that joke from "The Simpsons"(from the good years) & as an american I wish we have your healthcare.

the fast heart rate isn't an uncommon thing.

For a human aged 18 or more years, a normal resting heart rate can be anything between 60 and 100 beats per minute. I always used to freak doctors out when I was a kid and feeling playful b/c they'd check my heartrate and I'd speed it up then slow it down then speed it up again while they were listening to it.

my average resting heart rate was also 110BPM which they could never explain and would always be bewildered about... b/c I lead a very healthy life >_> so don't fret about the heartbeat thing ^-^

Your father's got his family by his side to help him through this

That's good.

When I had my little heart problem, my heart rate was hitting in the 90's and at times over 100. It took almost a week after they fixed the problem (two arteries at +90% blockage, and one at +80%) that it decided it didn't need to pump as fast anymore and dropped down to a sedate 68 bpm. The change in heart rate was dramatic. One hour it was 90+, and the next hour it was in the 70's, and the hour after that under 70.

About your dad feeling and looking so much better, that's the problem with heart ailments: Once they're fixed, you feel much better very quickly. But remember, the after effects of the problem are still present, and they take time to heal properly. Just like a cut doesn't heal overnight, the heart takes time to recover and maintain proper operation.

*hugs* wish I had more to offer, man. :/

The sprinkles contain potassium benzoate.

.....

That's bad.

Can I go now?

Well hey, so far so good I suppose. I hope you guys get to the bottom of things and that he has a full safe speedy recovery!

I read that in Team Rocket talk

Good to hear your dad is recovering. I hope they find what caused it to happen!

But it's great to hear that things are slightly inrpoving. at least he's not in pain

I think by default doctors give everyone a mixed prognosis to cover their bases.

The side-effect being everybody interested in that prognosis is always left stressed out.

Is the hospital food good?

Haven't heard any complaints from him... so it must not be too bad. *shrug*

Well, I hope he's back home soon. :)

You know, I'm wondering if he had something called Vulnerable Plaque. Even people with low cholesterol can have them (Basically a pocket of cholesterol just outside the blood vessel's wall, which ruptures and then clogs it on the spot)...

I know all about the Canadian health care system due to living in Toronto.. and as great as it is to not have to sell your soul away to a doctor just to get looked at... its far from perfect... the wait times alone are killer.

I really hope your dad turns out to be okay and that they find out why his heart is beating irregularly..

I'm sure he'll be fine!

Things must be looking up if Our Host is slipping back into a comedy routine in his journals.
have you shown him your YouTube claims to fame, the original skit and then the homage paid by DasBoSchitt? That just might do the trick.

"Can he leave the hospital now?"

HUGS.

Yes by the sounds of things your Dad is a pretty active person and being in Hospital would be boring him to death.

I just saw this journal and it's good to know. I'm glad your dad is feeling more energetic. try to be patient with the recovery though. I deal with a lot of people that end up coming back. Resist impulsive decisions because recovery is never an overnight thing.