COVID-19 & US healthcare system - thread relapse

[LynnInDenver]

Nursing homes in Canada are being hit about that hard, too. That's kicked off a discussion about how we as a country treat our elders ... and, without anything new coming along to crowd the issue out of the headlines, it's a discussion that we're actually having.

As well as it should be a discussion. It may require reworking the work/life balance for some people if it's identified that there's a need to try to spread it out and keeping people in private homes longer, for instance (since working full time doesn't leave time to deal with someone who needs day to day help and also care for themselves)... it's not a simple problem to tackle even if we didn't have a pandemic. I count myself lucky that my parents, in their late 60s now, are still more than capable of complete independence.

A very small minority are questioning whether three's a moral basis to the concept of for-profit healthcare. The fact that we can actually raise moral issues about anything at the moment is, in my humble opinion, encouraging - as long as we can actually have the discussion and reach a consensus.

All you need to do is look to us in the U.S., and that answers the question; there shouldn't be ANY room for for-profit healthcare on a purely moral basis given how quickly it can devolve into "if you can afford to pay, it's OK, and even then we'll insure that your health problem will make it impossible to do anything else financially because we view even the unavoidable health issues to be completely and utterly avoidable or at least that you need to make sure you can afford to have it happen to you." (Note: that's a bit of an oversimplification but seems to be the way the Republicans have been effectively treating it.) I could actually argue that there's a range of things that there should be no room at all for the for-profit models, all of them that would be considered "essential services", like food basics. The free market is HORRIBLE for such things, we have too many "essential" industries that have devolved down to too few choices to really control the providers sufficiently.