Barry Baines
speaker
1,145 appearances
30 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 3 Apr
Barry Baines’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So whereas here in the United States, if you need knee replacement, usually, you know, that could be scheduled and, you know, within a matter of weeks to maybe a month or so. If you're in other single payer systems in other countries, typically, you may have to wait months and months and months.
So there's a trade-off with that of having insurance and then what some of the downsides of that tend to be long waiting times for things.
Yeah. Now, what they've done, though, again, even in single payer systems, they sort of have a little backdoor um, that if you have financial resources, they, they sort of allow you to get, you know, you're all in the national, you know, the single payer system, but if you want to pay more money, okay, you can do that.
And there are, you know, private doc, you know, doctors who are also in the national, their national health system or single payer system. And, uh, you know, uh, Stan, if you have the dollars and you don't want to wait six months to have a knee replacement, guess what? You can pay for going outside the single payer system and have your knee replaced in one month.
What's sort of interesting, again, it's at an individual level and at a population level. And I think over, we clearly try and look at the public health perspective and a broader view. And just about every developed country has better health outcomes than we do in the United States.
And they all pretty much have single payer, you know, essentially have single payer systems, which again, means that everybody who lives there can get health care. And that's not the case in the United States or or the care that that people can get. If you show up in an emergency room, you'll get care.
But but that's what you know, that's why our health care system tends to be so expensive because we don't have that good primary care system or what we were talking about before. You have an MD that you trust, that you have a relationship with. And for a lot of people,
Their doctor is the emergency room or the urgent care clinic, which generally tends to be more expensive than if you have an appointment with your doctor.
Yeah, those are clearly, there are a lot of access things, but again, that's a whole different issue. That has to be with,
where we're at with with shortages in our health care system from a provider perspective there's a real shortage of primary care providers in terms of internists family physicians um pediatricians just in in general and again i don't i don't want to be going down the rabbit hole for why that is uh but we have um a lot of doctors are You know, doctors and nurses.
I mean, it's, you know, it's right.
Then we had COVID, which just totally like screwed everything up for just about just about everybody. And so all those kind of things, again, there there are issues that they relate to insurance. OK, but that's not a health and that's not the health insurance complication we have.
Once you get insurance, then you have this other bag, you know, can of worms, you know, like, you know, like you, you know, talked about where, well, you want to get in for, you know, for your annual exam and you have to wait, you know, months and months and months and months, you know. although I know, and I, I've encountered the same thing.
And, uh, then they also say, but if you'd like to be on a waiting list, cause people cancel and you have flexibility, uh, you know, you can get in a lot, a lot, a lot sooner. So, right.
Yeah, that was the hallmark of the Johnson administration. Johnson administration. It was like in the 60s. In the 1960s. Yeah. There had been, you know, historically multiple attempts to get Medicare. you know, Medicare, a Medicare type program. And I think even with, with FDR, you know, trying to, trying to do that. So that's where, but that was the hallmark of, you know, of where Medicare.
All right.
Actually, I know a little bit about that. And what it relates to was some tax treatment. And this was tax laws that allowed companies to offer health insurance benefits to their employees and it wouldn't be counted like as income.
I don't know, again, I'm not a tax lawyer, but the whole thing that spawned employer health insurance was how the money was treated as a benefit so that when I was employed, I wasn't the beneficiary. Health benefits I was getting were not treated as taxable income and the company could deduct it all from their books. Right. And so it was a whole tax thing.
It wasn't designed because, oh, this is a better way to get money. health care coverage for people in the United States. If, you know, again, I may sound a little cynical here with this, but if anybody thinks it's different than it was, you know, a lot of tax lobbies and things like that is very, very complicated. And once that became embedded in the system,
uh good luck trying to you know to go in in a different in a different direction but but i didn't want to say one thing that again relates to something that that clarence said and i'm going to quote uh teddy roosevelt i believe is the person who said this he said you do what you can where you are with what you have Okay. And this, you know, this is the system that we have now.
Showing 741–760 of 1,145 · page 38 of 58
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