A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private
Why the Dutch ended up with private health insurance for everybody
Democrats in the United States who support Medicare-for-all want to take a fractured and stratified health care system and make it more unified and equitable through nationalized health insurance.
The Netherlands saw the same problems in the mid-2000s, but they came up with a different fix.
Before then, the country had a two-tiered health care system: About two-thirds of the country was covered by a social health insurance program, and the remaining third was covered by private insurance. Disparities developed between the two tiers; wealthier people got better access to doctors with their private coverage.
By 2006, the two-tiered system teetered on the brink. Health care was becoming very expensive for the middle class, who faced high out-of-pocket costs. Yet private insurance was more attractive to doctors, because it paid better, than the public program that was covering people with lower incomes. And about 2 percent of the population still lacked insurance. (8.5% were uninsured in the US during 2018.
https://khn.org/news/number-of-americans-without-insurance-rises-in-20
18/ )
So the Dutch decided to overhaul their health insurance. The ruling center-right government compromised on a program to achieve universal coverage, which both sides agreed was essential, without abandoning the private market.
“There was a window of opportunity. The old system had really hit a wall,” Patrick Jeurissen, a health policy professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, told me.
The average cost to a Dutch citizen for health insurance is about 1,400 euros, or $1,615, annually. The annual deductible is today capped at €385 ($429) . . . More precisely: In 2019, basic health insurance in the Netherlands would on average cost 1,453 euros per year per person.
More at www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/17/21046874/netherlands-univers
al-health-insurance-private
=====================
I was not sure I believed those low, low costs. I looked it up. This is what I found:
Basic health insurance in the Netherlands (basisverzekering)
www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce
Basic health insurance costs around 100 euros per month and covers:
Appointments with your doctor (huisarts)
Stays at the hospital, surgery and emergency treatment (ziekenhuis)
Ambulance services and patient transport (ambulancevervoer)
Medicine prescriptions (medicijnen)
Blood tests (bloedonderzoek)
Dental care for children under 18 years (tandarts)
Limited dental care for adults over 18, restricted to dental surgery, dental x-rays
Mental health care (geestelijke gezondheidszorg)
Appointments with medical specialists such as dermatologists, allergists or internal specialists (medisch specialist)
Pregnancy, birth care and midwifery services (zwangerschaps- en geboortezorg)
Maternity care (kraamzorg)
Handicapped care (gehandicaptenzorg)
Aged care (ouderenzorg)
Nursing on location (wijkverpleging)
Some therapeutic services such as speech therapy, occupational therapy and diet advice
Physiotherapy (fysiotherapie) for chronic disorders, covered from the 21st treatment onwards
More at www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insuran
ce
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's comprehensive, affordable and it makes perfect sense.
Of course, it'll never happen here with that selfish PoS in the WH and boot licking Reps ruling the senate.
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Quote:Even if the President was a Democrat and the Senate was a majority Democrat, it won't happen. There will be a crooked Democratic Senator, such as Joe Lieberman, to make it fail:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
It's comprehensive, affordable and it makes perfect sense.
Of course, it'll never happen here with that selfish PoS in the WH and boot licking Reps ruling the senate.
"Senate Democrats Drop the Public Option to Woo Lieberman, and Liberals Howl"
December 21, 2009
www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-article/senate-democr
ats-drop-public-option-woo-lieberman-and-liberals-howl
The present healthcare system is more expensive, as a percent of GNP, than any other in the world and the Senate will insure it stays that way.
www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compa
re-countries/#item-relative-size-wealth-u-s-spends-disproportionate-amount-health
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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SECOND, you're not telling me anything I haven't already posted about.
I really appreciate the article; I find the Dutch choice- to do away with their public healthcare to prop up the private one - a curious one, but they made it workable (so far, even tho the article hints that the future may not be so rosy). I do intend to re-read the article again, to make sure that I understand what it's saying.
They seem to have retained small-business capitalism by keeping specialists as private practitioners.
But they made their system workable by doing things - like having nonprofit insurances and nonprofit hospitals (no listings on the stock exchanges for THOSE entities! No Boards of Directors, no shareholders meetings...) - which would be just as unacceptable to the healthcare industry here as Medicare for All, or even the public option.
The sense I get of the Dutch system was that it was written to be acceptable to individual doctors/practitioners there, while the ACA was written to be acceptable to corporations here. When the law was written I'm sure that every interested corporation - every insurance, every hospital corp, every pharmaceutical company, every rehab center, every laboratory- assessed how much they might make or lose on each provision of the bill, and the bill wouldn't be passed until each corporation (and its lobbyists) blessed it.
So the real reason why we have such a fucked up system (in pretty much everything, from foreign policy to food production to healthcare to banking) isn't because of Democrats or Republicans or some flaw in the construction of Congress or what-have-you, it is simply because (in essence) one dollar equals one vote, and those with the most dollars get the most votes. We are, truly, an oligarchy with only the trappings of democracy.
Anyway, I do like the idea of keeping doctors and other practitioners as competing small businesses, but the for-profit hospitals and insurances and pharmas would have to disappear if we wanted to achieve cost savings. I don't see any reason why practitioners CAN'T continue as snall businesses, and compete with each other, even if they're getting paid by the government.
One more thing to keep in mind: HMOs, even presumed non-profits like Kaiser, aren't the answer either. Kaiser has a provision in its charter that technically makes it a non-profit but in reality skews the behavior of both the doctors AND the institution as a whole: Kaiser gets it contractual per-person funding, but at the end of the year the money that it DOESN'T spend on patient care goes into the doctors' pockets.
In theory, you could say that this encourages cost-effective preventive care - spending money on diabetes medication instead of leg amputation - but IN REALITY that means tests not run, and problems ignored. I've known three people PERSONALLY whose cancer diagnoses were too-long delayed, and that's not counting our DDs medical trauma.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!
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The VOX project EVERYBODY COVERED examines more than the Netherlands' system.
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/13/21055327/everybody-covered
It looks at
- Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America
- https://vox.com/health-care/2020/1/13/21028702/medicare-for-all-taiwan
-health-insurance
- Two sisters. Two different journeys through Australia’s health care system.
- https://vox.com/2020/1/15/21030568/australia-health-insurance-medicare
- The Netherlands has universal health insurance — and it’s all private
- https://vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/17/21046874/netherlands-uni
versal-health-insurance-private
- The answer to America’s health care cost problem might be in Maryland
- https://vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/22/21055118/maryland-health
-care-global-hospital-budget
and will include
- United Kingdom (coming January 24).
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No system is perfect, though here in the US we seem to have created a system that disadvantages everybody but the corporations. That's the basic take-home message.
In the Netherlands BTW the hospitals are non-profit, the doctors' groups are cooperatives (not corporations), every participant including pharmacies is TIGHTLY regulated by government - a point made multiple times in the article - and it's the one system out of those examined where - as indicated in the article - more people have a hard time paying their bills.
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Quote:It might be the famous checks and balances are the problem. A focused and wealthy group outside government can apply a small pressure on exactly the right spot to make the Federal government lose consciousness: the “Death Touch” or dim mak. The government has never been healthy and robust. It is sickly, almost directionless, always tending toward ineffectiveness in Congress, by Constitutional design. When the Constitution faces a very determined group that wants to stop the Federal government from functioning, we know what happens since it has happened thousands of times since the Constitution was ratified. Somebody ought to fix that. Anybody want a new Constitutional convention? Anybody?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you're not telling me anything I haven't already posted about.
So the real reason why we have such a fucked up system (in pretty much everything, from foreign policy to food production to healthcare to banking) isn't because of Democrats or Republicans or some flaw in the construction of Congress or what-have-you, it is simply because (in essence) one dollar equals one vote, and those with the most dollars get the most votes. We are, truly, an oligarchy with only the trappings of democracy.
www.medicaldaily.com/truth-about-pressure-points-which-ones-can-kill-y
ou-and-which-ones-are-just-myths-316528
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Long ago I was what is called a Control Systems Engineer, a CSE. CSE designs all the stuff in the Control Room of a petrochemical plant. Believe it or not, this actually has application to government. The CSE is responsible for the safety shutdown system in the chemical plant, the system that takes over if the human operators fall asleep on the job, or panic, or do exactly the wrong thing while being absolutely certain they are doing the right thing because they fundamentally misunderstand what the control room displays are telling them.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
No system is perfect, though here in the US we seem to have created a system that disadvantages everybody but the corporations. That's the basic take-home message.
In the Netherlands BTW the hospitals are non-profit, the doctors' groups are cooperatives (not corporations), every participant including pharmacies is TIGHTLY regulated by government - a point made multiple times in the article - and it's the one system out of those examined where - as indicated in the article - more people have a hard time paying their bills.
When the chemical plant is only drawings on paper, before it becomes reality in steel and concrete, we do a very formal safety review, looking for malfunctions that could explode the whole plant, spreading fire and pollution everywhere. No system is perfect, but much can be done at this safety review to make the chemical plant closer to perfect. Now for the political part:
The Founding Fathers never did a formal safety review on their design while it was only words on paper of the Constitution. Their thinking only went as far as the next election will bring in new people to extinguish the fires caused by the old people operating the government. How much can go wrong in the years between elections? A great deal can, more than the Founding Fathers imagined. And the result of never having a safety review is metaphorically, sometime literally, fires and explosions and human suffering that never burns itself out and stops, all caused by government. It would be nice if humans in control of the government always understood what they were doing wrong, like it would be nice if the operators of a chemical plant always understood what they were doing, but you can't depend on humans doing the right thing. Your design has to look into the details of human failure that extends year after year, election after election.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Here’s something I missed when it first came out a few weeks ago. It turns out that Chase Manhattan Bank was instrumental in getting the Shah of Iran admitted to the United States for medical treatment in 1979, which led directly to the Iran hostage crisis that eventually doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The whole thing was called Project Eagle and was coordinated by Joseph Reed, the chief of staff to the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller.
But that’s not all. After touching off the hostage crisis, Project Eagle was then redirected to ensuring that they didn’t get released too soon:
After the hostages were taken, the Carter administration worked desperately to try to free the captives….[But] the team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.
The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.
“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.
This is a conspiracy theory of longstanding—namely that the Reagan campaign tried to prevent the release of the Iranian hostages before Election Day 1980. But according to notes he wrote at the time, it sure sounds like Reed worked closely with Reagan’s people on exactly that. Such patriots.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/01/reagan-and-the-hostages/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Here’s something I missed when it first came out a few weeks ago. It turns out that Chase Manhattan Bank was instrumental in getting the Shah of Iran admitted to the United States for medical treatment in 1979, which led directly to the Iran hostage crisis that eventually doomed Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The whole thing was called Project Eagle and was coordinated by Joseph Reed, the chief of staff to the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller.
But that’s not all. After touching off the hostage crisis, Project Eagle was then redirected to ensuring that they didn’t get released too soon:
After the hostages were taken, the Carter administration worked desperately to try to free the captives….[But] the team around Mr. Rockefeller, a lifelong Republican with a dim view of Mr. Carter’s dovish foreign policy, collaborated closely with the Reagan campaign in its efforts to pre-empt and discourage what it derisively labeled an “October surprise” — a pre-election release of the American hostages, the papers show.
The Chase team helped the Reagan campaign gather and spread rumors about possible payoffs to win the release, a propaganda effort that Carter administration officials have said impeded talks to free the captives.
“I had given my all” to thwarting any effort by the Carter officials “to pull off the long-suspected ‘October surprise,’” Mr. Reed wrote in a letter to his family after the election, apparently referring to the Chase effort to track and discourage a hostage release deal. He was later named Mr. Reagan’s ambassador to Morocco.
This is a conspiracy theory of longstanding—namely that the Reagan campaign tried to prevent the release of the Iranian hostages before Election Day 1980. But according to notes he wrote at the time, it sure sounds like Reed worked closely with Reagan’s people on exactly that. Such patriots.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/01/reagan-and-the-hostages/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
This probably did happen.
I'm just wondering how you can believe that this happens, but at the same time you don't see the media manipulation against Trump on a daily basis. Or at the very least, why you don't even question it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I know actual GOP politicians - Senators Cruz and Cornyn. I also watch Trump give speeches and answer questions. These people are fucked up in the head. The MSM does not have to tell me this. The GOP tells me this very loudly and clearly. I also know that the people who vote for GOP, except the very richest ones who I respect their judgement, don't share my opinion. Me and the rich GOP voters perfectly understand what is seriously wrong with the GOP, it is just that the rich are bought by the money the GOP pours into their bank accounts.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
This probably did happen.
I'm just wondering how you can believe that this happens, but at the same time you don't see the media manipulation against Trump on a daily basis. Or at the very least, why you don't even question it.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Let's make it even simpler for you to understand: the richest GOP voters know that Trump is a crook, a liar, a tax cheater, a stupid man with diarrhea of the mouth. Talking about it won't make Trump change, so why would the rich bother? But they can depend on Trump looking after his own wealth and as a side effect making the rich GOP voters even richer.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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