The Debate Club discussion

Not sure if this is the right folder for this.

I think the only answer is a mix of private and universal healthcare, because when you don’t have a mix it can be, well, absolutely terrible. First of all, the American healthcare system has a lot of downsides. The main one is the cost, so many people can’t afford healthcare and there are literally people dying because they don’t have the money, or going into extreme debt. But aside from that, to be really honest, it’s amazing. Er wait times are short, 2 hours on average, wait times for getting a diagnosis and seeing specialists are shorter, there is less medical gaslighting, and people just get better care in general- if they can afford it. Now, an example of universal healthcare is Canada. I find in other countries people imagine that healthcare here is great, just because it’s free, but it’s quite the oppposite. Hospital wait times range from 6-12 hours (at least where I live), there are people dying in waiting rooms because of the wait times, people often leave hospitals without ever getting treatment. Medical gaslighting is a huge issue, there is also a lot of gender bias with healthcare. If a middle aged man goes in complaining of a stomachache, doctors will immediately care, and try to find out what’s wrong. If a teenage girl goes in saying she can’t breathe, is dizzy, and has a heart rate of 140, doctors will brush it off and say it’s a panic attack. I know this from experience. And while the emergency healthcare is enough of a problem, the healthcare system is designed for healthy people with acute illnesses and old people. If you aren’t injured, male, critically ill or old, there’s a huge chance you will not get proper care. Wait times for specialists are extremely long, and medical gaslighting is extremely common. I’ve experienced a lot of it, and I can’t even begin to describe the degree it’s gotten to. And my grandma who has cancer, even has experienced it a lot. She was losing her vision, etc, and they did a mri scan, and found multiple tumours, but the oncologist said he doubted it could possibly be cancer, and she had to wait months for a biopsy. During this time, she has lost hearing in one ear and now has severe double vision and sight problems… she finally got the biopsy, and guess what? They found brain cancer. If they had waited longer, there could have been much worse consequences, and thankfully she’ll be getting treatment finally, but it could have ended very badly. And this is just a small sample of what the system is like here (btw what I stated about the US is what I know from people I’ve talked to who are American and there experiences, as well as data I’ve seen)

socialism 🤩

ash ³³ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ wrote: "socialism 🤩"

wdym?

does anyone wanna debate with me about this? it’s just my favorite topic 😭

i don’t have too much time rn aves but there’s no reason why we should be struggling to pay for emergency medical care in the so called ‘land of the free’. they complain about women not wanting to have kids and then make it cost over 10k to give birth to the kid.

yes, but universal healthcare can be just as bad…

I think there should be universal healthcare available but also privatized options, and insurance plans to cover people with chronic illnesses so they can get better healthcare, and the government should put more funding towards healthcare, and med school students should be taught more about complex chronic health conditions. Also diagnostic specialists should be available, and we should encourage more people to become doctors

i don’t think that gender bias and things like that are limited to just canada/ not as bad as the us. also some rural areas have limited healthcare and the wait times (at least in some big cities or crowded areas) can be so so long omg 💔. i can find some other things wrong with US healthcare but i agree that money is the biggest issue for us

also the people here do not wanna be doctors, and that’s a separate issue bc US colleges are so hard and selective to even apply for, and so expensive if you want to go to a top one. you have to stress over your extracurriculars and activities while i’ve heard canada and other places are more focused on grades (correct me if i’m wrong)

but it’s better than Canadian healthcare, specifically for people with chronic illnesses. If you look at statistics of average wait times, it’s 2 hours, and the average wait time to see a specialist is only a few weeks. Here it can take up to 12 hours in the hospital to be seen by a doctor, and up to a year to see a specialist. You could argue that people are dying in the us due to not being able to afford healthcare, but people are also dying here due to the long wait times and doctors gaslighting and saying that it’s all in their head (it almost happened to my grandma who I mentioned before)

quynh~vi! ᯓ★ (ia ) wrote: "also the people here do not wanna be doctors, and that’s a separate issue bc US colleges are so hard and selective to even apply for, and so expensive if you want to go to a top one. you have to st..."

I think extracurriculars and specifically volunteer hours are really important here as well, and some universities are easier to get into though

okay so what i’m seeing online is that the us does have shorter wait times for regular/ elective care, but canada has a shorter wait time for emergency care.

quynh~vi! ᯓ★ (ia ) wrote: "okay so what i’m seeing online is that the us does have shorter wait times for regular/ elective care, but canada has a shorter wait time for emergency care."

um no what

so yeah i do agree that the US’s healthcare would be somewhat better for people with specialized issues, but in general for the whole population, i’d rather have people be able to afford the care at all then get it faster for the people with money, if that makes sense?

I’ve seen a LOT of evidence proving otherwise lol

idk man google may be failing me atm

quynh~vi! ᯓ★ (ia ) wrote: "so yeah i do agree that the US’s healthcare would be somewhat better for people with specialized issues, but in general for the whole population, i’d rather have people be able to afford the care a..."

yeah, true. The Canadian healthcare system is great for healthy people, but not for anyone else

quynh~vi! ᯓ★ (ia ) wrote: "idk man google may be failing me atm"

ok sorry that just made me mad because I’ve seen so much evidence 😭

basically people in the us spend more money on healthcare so we have more resources so i guess there is something good about it spending thousands of dollars to get medical care

yeah the Canadian healthcare system is seriously messed up 😭 to be very honest I don’t think healthy/non chronically ill people will ever actually understand the healthcare system to the full extent

im sorry if I was getting mad or anything I just feel really strongly about this because of the amount of trauma and stuff the Canadian medical system has caused me lol

quynh~vi! ᯓ★ (ia ) wrote: "also the people here do not wanna be doctors, and that’s a separate issue bc US colleges are so hard and selective to even apply for, and so expensive if you want to go to a top one. you have to st..."

I don’t know much about healthcare right now especially worldwide, but to be what I want I have to get an MD and let me tell you… anywhere worth going is ridiculous! I went to a college visitation camp and they literally advised us AGAINST taking pre-med or if we could avoid it med in general, because it’s so demanding and stressful. I think it sucks when one of the jobs we literally need nobody wants to do because the schooling is so rough. I mean my friends who wanted to be doctors are going into nursing because they don’t want to deal with all that school and I can’t blame them. I’m going into psychiatry and I’m setting myself up for at least 10 years of schooling.
Healthcare is ridiculously expensive, but it has to be to make medical school worth it. Nobody wants to be in debt from going to school for 8 years to make minimum wage. In the end it circles back to who’s getting the money, half the time not even the doctors are being compensated properly.
Ivy League schools act like they have so many applicants and they probably do, but at least in the world of medicine, those kids are applying for things that pay well, like surgery. That’s how demanding and expensive it is.

yeah exactly! I went to a career fair once and yeah the people there said I shouldn’t be a doctor because it’s too hard 😭

and like high schools around here encourage students to work in trades a lot, and sure that’s important bu having more doctors is more important

Ophelia ˚࿔ (semi-hiatus) wrote: "ash ³³ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ wrote: "socialism 🤩"

wdym?"

sorry 😭 i don't know much about this topic but what you were describing is a mix of socialism and free market capitalism used by various scandinavian countries often referred to as the nordic model

ash ³³ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ wrote: "Ophelia ˚࿔ (semi-hiatus) wrote: "ash ³³ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ ᵈᵘ wrote: "socialism 🤩"

wdym?"

sorry 😭 i don't know much about this topic but what you were describing is a mix of socialism and free market capitali..."

ohhh ok

@tessie I think that healthcare in general is an extremely demanding job, and in the US, it’s not only 12+ years of grueling training/schooling, you also have to contend with the job being extremely politicized. I want to be an obgyn, but there’s a huge shortage because they are underpaid and often laws prevent them from doing their job out of fear of punishment or losing their license, so less and less people are choosing that as a specialty. Rural healthcare is also a struggle because providers don’t want to work long shifts while being underpaid and understaffed with minimal resources. In some places, there’s great healthcare (for exorbitant prices), but in most it’s lacking and also expensive. The problem with doctors on the United states is that they are continuing to be discredited and targeted for providing care to patients while not really having any incentive to go into the field besides internal motivation. Literally everyone has discouraged me from becoming a dr because of all of the drawbacks so genuinely the only thing driving me towards it is my own passion for medicine.

@Livi
I agree, when I said demanding I meant the schooling, all of it IS really demanding.
I live in a very rural town with a small population, and the healthcare is horrible. Horrible as in, we went to the emergency room for my mother when she wa shaving extreme stomach pains, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong and sent her home. She ended up getting emergency surgery as soon as she met up with a doctor in another city because they apparently should’ve done it that night. Later my sister goes to a different emergency room for similar stomach pains so bad she was throwing up, and they told us she was getting her period. My sister is ten and has not hit puberty. Turns out it’s gall stones and she’s getting surgery in a few weeks.
My dad had a panic attack and they called for a heart attack kit thing.
It’s just genuinely bad, and the fact that all these people advise against going into that kind of career is concerning! I feel like a lot of passion that inspired med students to pursue that job in college was depleted after they realized how grueling the schooling is and how underpaid and used they are in hospitals.
I dislike physiology but I don’t mind pharmacology and I know the prior is necessary for me. I don’t think I could be an actual type of doctor though.

Tessie wrote: "@Livi
I agree, when I said demanding I meant the schooling, all of it IS really demanding.
I live in a very rural town with a small population, and the healthcare is horrible. Horrible as in, we w..."

yes exactly!! my dad went in for tremors, literally just tremors in his hand, and they immediately ordered a ct scan, mri and got him to see a neurologist and admitted him overnight, and they found nothing in the scans or anything. My grandma had cancer a year ago, and she was in remission and started to have symptoms again, they eventually agreed to do an mri and they found multiple tumors. The doctors said it’s impossible for it to be cancer and she had to wait months to get a biopsy, and during this time she was losing her vision and hearing, and guess what? It was the same cancer she had before… if they hadn’t finally agreed she could have died, she’s finally getting treatment but still…

I think healthcare worldwide should follow Universal Health Coverage (UHC), so everyone can access the care they need without facing financial hardship from medical bills. Right now, many people are burdened with catastrophic medical costs, leaving billions struggling to pay and pushing millions into poverty due to the high costs and lack of support. The best way to fix this, save money, and be cost-effective while saving lives and increasing life expectancy is by strengthening Primary Health Care (PHC).

My research link: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sh...

Band wrote: "I think healthcare worldwide should follow Universal Health Coverage (UHC), so everyone can access the care they need without facing financial hardship from medical bills. Right now, many people ar..."

Yes but think about more than cost. I hate how people always focus on how many people get care, not on the quality of the care. Universal healthcare is also absolutely terrible. I lives in Canada, and words can not describe how bad healthcare is here

I'm sorry to hear than and I understand that. Usually now days the rich get better health care than anymore.

not in Canada, it’s universal and everyone gets equal healthcare (well except for things like men and healthy people getting better care), but it’s still absolutely terrible. Honestly, from what I’ve heard from everyone I know, if it weren’t for the cost, American healthcare would be great. Because I know a friend who literally got diagnosed with a chronic illness the first time she saw a cardiologist, without even knowing what it was. She was never told it was all in her head… and that has never happened to me or most people here. Healthcare has never been that easy

Yes, American health care is wonderful but only rich people can afford it. I will have to do more research on Canada health care latter.

Band wrote: "Yes, American health care is wonderful but only rich people can afford it. I will have to do more research on Canada health care latter."

Yeah, and that’s a huge problems so I really think there should be a mix. In my opinions with anything with politics there has to be balance, when you go to far in either direction it can be bad

Yea, ik and it's sad.