<story><title>I had a health crisis in France</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-lamar-french-healthcare-20161118-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nothrabannosir</author><text>&lt;i&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just convenient to use the system. I even had multiple MRIs and dozens of XRays after minor sport injuries just to be sure.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure where to draw the line, though. How do you determine when &amp;quot;just in case&amp;quot; costs too much?&lt;p&gt;Remember, all Austrians paid for your mris and X-rays. I don&amp;#x27;t doubt it was worth it this specific case, but aren&amp;#x27;t the incentives wrong?</text></item><item><author>cel1ne</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not just that the costs of getting healthy are taken care of.&lt;p&gt;Here in austria free, yearly &amp;quot;health checkups&amp;quot; are offered to you by every doctor. Meaning, when you go there because of a cold, he will tell you that you ought to do a checkup every year, which include blood tests, psychological screening for alcoholism and other individualized tests like prostate cancer for men.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just convenient to use the system. I even had multiple MRIs and dozens of XRays after minor sport injuries just to be sure.</text></item><item><author>antirez</author><text>This is normal on all western Europe states. However France has very high standards in general about health care and is regarded as one of the best systems. I think it&amp;#x27;s time for US citizens to accept that most of Europe has better life expectancy, lower infant mortality than US, and to be ill is not a financial tragedy. Moreover the treatment that a low-income and high-income citizen receives is very similar, so there is a lot less social discrimination. If this is not enough to show that the US system has issues, note that also in US, healthcare procedures are generally overpriced compared to their costs around the world. There is obviously a problem to fix and Obama was going in the right direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stefs</author><text>&amp;gt; How do you determine when &amp;quot;just in case&amp;quot; costs too much?&lt;p&gt;the physicians usually try to take the safe route just in case - if they deem it worth it. i&amp;#x27;m still in the low risk category (~~young~~ not old, passably athletic) so my doctor told me more than once that it&amp;#x27;s probably nothing and we don&amp;#x27;t need to do the (expensive) X, the (cheap) Y is enough (maybe Y reveals something that justifies X).&lt;p&gt;it doesn&amp;#x27;t always work; as a personal anecdote - my uncle suffered a debilitating headache once and was told to take aspirin for several days until my aunt had enough and drove him to the hospital on her own. turned out to be cerebral bleeding. he barely survived and is now mentally disabled.&lt;p&gt;this a) takes him out of the workforce, which looses the state money through reduced taxes and b) ensures him an invalidity pension, which costs the state money.&lt;p&gt;was it worth it to save the money? on paper it&amp;#x27;s the additional cost of checking N people who&amp;#x27;re having headaches plus the cost of treating M people who&amp;#x27;re actually affected vs. the money he would have paid into the system plus the money he now costs the system over, say, 20 years. additionally he consumes less and his wife&amp;#x27;s business is struggling because he&amp;#x27;s not much help anymore.&lt;p&gt;for us, personally, it&amp;#x27;s still a tragedy, but those cases happen. you have to draw the line somewhere. it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; additional costs though, it&amp;#x27;s still a trade off.</text></comment>
<story><title>I had a health crisis in France</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-lamar-french-healthcare-20161118-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nothrabannosir</author><text>&lt;i&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just convenient to use the system. I even had multiple MRIs and dozens of XRays after minor sport injuries just to be sure.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure where to draw the line, though. How do you determine when &amp;quot;just in case&amp;quot; costs too much?&lt;p&gt;Remember, all Austrians paid for your mris and X-rays. I don&amp;#x27;t doubt it was worth it this specific case, but aren&amp;#x27;t the incentives wrong?</text></item><item><author>cel1ne</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not just that the costs of getting healthy are taken care of.&lt;p&gt;Here in austria free, yearly &amp;quot;health checkups&amp;quot; are offered to you by every doctor. Meaning, when you go there because of a cold, he will tell you that you ought to do a checkup every year, which include blood tests, psychological screening for alcoholism and other individualized tests like prostate cancer for men.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just convenient to use the system. I even had multiple MRIs and dozens of XRays after minor sport injuries just to be sure.</text></item><item><author>antirez</author><text>This is normal on all western Europe states. However France has very high standards in general about health care and is regarded as one of the best systems. I think it&amp;#x27;s time for US citizens to accept that most of Europe has better life expectancy, lower infant mortality than US, and to be ill is not a financial tragedy. Moreover the treatment that a low-income and high-income citizen receives is very similar, so there is a lot less social discrimination. If this is not enough to show that the US system has issues, note that also in US, healthcare procedures are generally overpriced compared to their costs around the world. There is obviously a problem to fix and Obama was going in the right direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peteretep</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    &amp;gt; How do you determine when
    &amp;gt; &amp;quot;just in case&amp;quot; costs too
    &amp;gt; much
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Generally &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; don&amp;#x27;t in systems like this. The referring physician in association with national guidelines on cost and treatment plans does.</text></comment>