Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 20, 2009

“And check his insurance”.

Example of medical coverage before reform.

Put a dollar on Red for me.

After reform: 50/50 if he’s 40, 75% chance he won’t make it if he’s 50, 100% we are going to let him die if he’s 60 or older.

ombudsman, I guess you neglected to return that choirbook you’re singing from…it’s been recalled due to being full of crap.

Strangetikigod, have you actually read HR3200 or are you just believing the media hype.

The prognosis is always Death. The only question is when and how.

You poor American’s who think “universal Health Care” is bad. I visit my doctor 100% free. I can walk into ANY walk in clinic across Canada - and most of the World - and it’s covered. If I need to be in the hospital, my hospital room is covered. My medication while in hospital is covered. TV and telephone, they are extra but they are not essential.

I feel sorry for you American’s fighting against this Health Care Reform.

look they brought out the machine that goes ping! the hospital director must be coming.

Agreed Allen. Although we sometimes have to wait a little longer for some of the more “frill” type operations; in an emergency we do get the care we need, and we don’t end up bankrupt because of some medical emergency! *0% co payments add up fast at 10,000 a day for some of the more critical care patients & all their medications. And our doctors are not so overpaid either.

Allan, Avolunteer;

Our (Canadian) health care system is anything but free! And I really have difficulty with anyone representing it abroad as such. 24.3 % of my gross earnings are taken away from me before I even see my paycheque. These are called taxes, and taxes are what pay for our healthcare system. In Ontario, Premier Maguinty imposed a new tax called EHT or Extended Healthcare Tax. This is paid by employers, who then incorporate this tax into the price point of any service or product they provide/sell.

Not that it is 100% accurate, but rather unbiased (?), here is a link to Wiki on taxes by country.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/IncomeTaxesBy_Country.svg

Looky looky, personal income taxes are higher then in the USA. Go figure. No government has their own money; they have ours hence nothing is free.

Yeah, and my aunt who died from lung cancer because her Canadian doctor wouldn’t send her to a specialist until she hit stage four? That’s the kind of health care I want. What about my cousin who can’t move to the city the rest of her family lives in because they don’t have a specialist for her special needs child and won’t allow one to be placed there…. despite it being a major city?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxratesaroundtheworld

fixed

It’s a shame that your aunt died because of misdiagnosis, Diane, but that can happen in any version of any healthcare system.

My brother, a US citizen living in Florida at the time, was diagnosed with ewing’s sarcoma at the age of 15. The hospital refused to treat him till my mother signed a paper saying that we were liable to pay up to $500,000. His treatment ran over the course of a year, racking up over a million dollars in fees. What the insurance didn’t pay cost us $20,000 when all was said and done, and after he was determined cancer free, the company dumped him.

After that, my brother was forced to pay for insurance at a premium rate of $1000 a month, till he had a clean bill of health for 5 years. They refused to pay for his hormone replacement therapy (chemo patients frequently have this problem) even up to this day, over a decade later.

My mother is never going to be able to retire. All her savings and retirement funds are gone to pay the HMOs, and I am bringing her to Canada with me.

The Canadian system isn’t perfect, and yes, we pay more in taxes. It could do with a lot of reform. But at least here people aren’t afraid to go to a clinic when they are sick, and the cost of prescription medication is kept down. Those evil socialist programs allowed me a year off on maternity and parental leave with an income (however reduced) to care for my son rather than only 6 weeks, and I got to come back to my job because the government protects my leave.

Not all governments are out to get you. Some actually see that some things like preventative medicine actually save the government money in the long run. Maybe if you are panicking unduly about HR3200 because of your evil government being in charge, people should actually address that issue rather than let them run our country into the ground and take you with them.

Allan

I’ve been born and raised and worked in Canada for 25 years before getting the hell out there. Nothing is free. Taxes took more of my income than I cared to give, -particularly in Quebec - the highest taxed province in Canada. The only thing that pissed me off more than paying for medicare that I never used (or abused), was paying for the lazy SOB’s that didn’t want to work.

If you’re not paying for your healthcare, then I can tell you that someone else is and is likely just as unhappy as I was about it. But it’s never free.

Back in the 50s my brother had some major health problems. Although both my parents were PHDs, they had to work till the late 70s to pay for this. Of course my family had to live a low middle class life despite a high middle class income. We were proud to pay for ourselves.

In the U.S., co- pays and insurance costs taken out of our “compensation package” (pay) add up to about the same as income taxes. We are “paid” more each year, we just don’t get raises in our paychecks any more. It goes straight to insurance companies with out the tax mechanism. Of course U.S. income taxes are the lowest in the world by far, and people still complain about how high they are. Insurance companies make health decisions for us, not the doctors or the patients.

Back to the cartoon strip, maybe the surgeon is just trying to determine who will open and who will receive….

I’m probably going to lose my house next month due to a foreclosure brought about, in part, by $250,000 in hospital bills in 2007, which completely destroyed my life’s savings and then some. Honestly, I’d rather spend my tax dollars on keeping everyone healthy than on buying stealth fighters and a new generation of nuclear missiles that even the PENTAGON doesn’t want, thank you.

Stage 4 Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Diagnosed in January. So far my insurance has paid over 100,000 this year. I have paid a little over 2400. I have very little to complain about.

I WANT my doctor making a lot of money. I want him fat and happy. I don’t want my doctor being harrassed by collection agencies because he can’t afford to pay back his education loans. I don’t want his distracted by wondering how he will afford to send his kids to college or get his car fixed because he makes less than I do.

I want an agency that sets prices of services and drugs.

off the subject…does anybody know where i can get an Obviousman t-shirt?

i would love to walk around with a “NO DUH” emblem on my chest.

uke= okay?

Guys, guys, the important questions here are:

–Should they go for two out of three? –Who gets to keep the coin?

Best of 7

Hey, somebody put a comic up top…

and , of course, the guy flipping the coin is the HMO guy

and , of course, the coin is double-sided

Are Americans so stupid that we can’t provide healthcare for ALL of us? It appears that way. We have morons with Medicaid, Saying “keep Govt out of my health care” nobody ever went broke underestimating the stuopidity of the American people and the rightwing.

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else.”

Ragtop, Your lucky the Insurance Companies still pay, Most Insurance companies have REAL DEATH PANELS. (not the one in Bible Spice’s head). whose only function is to deny benefits to paying customers so they can make massive profits. These SAME ins companies, Charge DR’s huge Premiums for their coverage.. That is who these inbred losers with Obama as hitler posters and bringing Guns to Presidential press conferences are defending and helping.

used to be that of every dollar paid in premiums, ninety-five cents was paid out in benefits. then the insurance companies switched from non profit to for profit. now they pay out eighty cents of a premium dollar in benefits. and decisions are made based on reducing that eighty cents even further….

I’d feel a lot better about the health care reform plans, and especially the public option, if Congress hadn’t rejected a proposal to put themselves under the public option plan. (This is according to news reports I’ve seen. If the reports are wrong, I’d appreciate being corrected.)

I’d also feel better about the plans for reform and the public option is President Obama would commit to putting himself and his family under the plan until his children are 18. (Again, if he’s said something like this, I’ve missed it and would appreciate being better informed.)

If the plan is a good idea for me, it’s a good idea for Congress. If it’s not good for members of Congress (and their families and their staffers, and their staffers’ families), why is it a good idea for me?

Here, here.

it might be an old English penny.

as a Canuck, one of the problems with our health care in Ontario is that the government of about 15 or 20 years ago decided to limit the number of places in med schools so as to prevent an “overstock” of doctors. now, people in smaller centers (and northern ones) are suffering from the shortage of doctors created back then. this serves to clog up emergency rooms with people who don’t have a family doctor. when my doctor retired, i had a bit of a problem finding a new one - and i live in the suburbs Toronto.

Speaking of the strip for Non Sequitur, get a life insurance anyway.

not so funny anymore

I often am loathe to comment on Non Sequitur, and leave it as it is for what it is, and it is the best.

I can see “Bible Spice” from my house…..

I’m not saying that the US health system doesn’t need fixing: it does. But government run health care with an annoymous board making your health decisions isn’t it.

My aunt wasn’t misdiagnosed. The doctor refused to refer her because he would have been monetarily punished for said referal.

“Gunshot wound… donor card… sorry, revision, we can’t save him!”

Allan you folks in Canada also have a 3x higher death rate from cancer and nearly a 2x higher death rate from heart disease.

Medical tourism from Canada is on the rise.

A woman in London gave birth on the sidewalk outside a hospital because she was refused an ambulance.

I’ll keep my health care just the way it is, thanks.

jmworacle, how is your vision of “obamacare” any different from the current situation? just substitute “insurance company” for “party”. “am i susing too many “”“”“”“?

pbrown280c, and women give birth in taxis and offices too.

without context, who knows. Higher death rates form heart disease and cancer in Canada; WRONG

Canada - Statscan. Age-standardized mortality rate per 100,000 population: Diseases of heart (I00-I09, I11, I13, I20-I51), 12.5%

USA - CDC ratio of age-adjusted death rates Diseases of heart (I00–I09,I11,I13,I20–I51) 26.0%

You are twice as likely to die from heart disease in the USA. Many, approx 50% (CDC) are undiagnosed. People are undiagnosed because they cannot afford health care perhaps? I cannot support that factually, however I’m throwing it out there for thought.

After adjusting for the 50 % undiagnosed Canadians die at about the same rate as Americans. Who’d have thunked?

You know, the ‘Flip a Coin’ system is very effective, and this is a perfect exa,ple of that. A doctor that needs to flip a coin to know how he is going to do his job, perfect. They should impliment that system into the department of corrections for prisoners on death row to decide who goes first.

new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Aug 19, 2009 Heart disease and cancer accounted for almost half (48.5 percent) of all deaths in 2007

sorry pb280c, but I am so weary of rhetoric.

And to think a comic inspired this discussion and analysis of our own, and each others medical systems. Which is better is not as important as the desire and effort to improve.

So, Harvey Dent is currently in charge of American health care? That sure explains a lot!

found it! Red Storm Rising, the doc is using a “Digital Decision Generator”!

Hey Wiley - I like your comics and sense of humour

Thanks again.

Diane: I’ve never heard of a doctor being punished for a referral to a specialist here in Ontario. I know several cancer survivors among my friends and coworkers and none had to wait till they were terminal before they got a referral to an oncologist. Perhaps your aunt’s doctor was just an bleeep of an MD. Plenty of those around… in both countries.

Thanx Allen, Yes, only Americans would scream NO, NO, please don’t give me healthcare!!!!

oscar014, considering “the media hype” hasn’t shut the hell up about the death panels no matter now ridiculous or insane they are, I’d say, no, I haven’t been listening to the media. I get my information from sources that are more reality-based.