Obama's Affordable Care insurance and Remicade payments.

Can't answer your questions about the Remicade. As far as the insurance goes, I think you are totally confused about Obamacare. There is no such thing as Obama insurance or "Affordable Care" insurance. The affordable care act that is commonly called Obamacare is nothing but a bunch of different laws regulating health insurance companies and mandating that everyone have insurance or pay a penalty. Most of this doesn't even go into effect until 2014 and is not even fully implemented until a few years after that. Some minor aspects have gone into effect already. One of them is you can add children 26 and under on to your insurance policy and children can't be denied coverage due to pre-existing health conditions. Do you have a health insurance policy you can ad your child to?

The only government medical insurance you might be able to get for your son would be Medicaid. If he's young enough he might qualify for CHIP:

http://www.chipmedicaid.org/

Otherwise he'll have to see if he qualifies for regular Medicaid. Your county department of social services should be able to help you find out.

What state are you in? Definitely visit healthcare.gov and see if you can get him into your states high risk pool. Currently, people with preexisting conditions are not able to purchase private health insurance.

There is an insurance through the gov't that you can apply for if you have been denied by an insurance company and they will cover you........

garylouisville,

Expanding the risk pool benefits everyone. It is estimated that at least half of all personal bankruptcies are medical, so the economic benefit of fewer personal bankruptcies helps everyone.

Of course, universal would have been my preference, and we would have joined the rest of the civilized world. Give it time. Within 10 years perhaps.

Universal healthcare isn't free, but the data shows it's cheaper and the outcomes are better.

OECD has a wealth of info on many subjects, including health.

www.oecd.org/els/healthpoliciesanddata/oecdhealthdata2012-frequentlyrequesteddata.htm

I do believe the US has the best healthcare available in the world. For those who can afford it. For those who have no insurance or poor insurance and can't afford to pay themselves, it's often substandard and sometimes life-threatening. We end up paying far more for these unfortunate individuals to be seen in emergency rooms than it would cost for care in a medical office.

I hope we can find some system that affords universal access to excellent health care without the "rationing" that becomes necessary in some systems.

There are a lot of faults with the US healthcare system. Whether Obamacare will have any effect on that remains to be seen. It will obviously help some, including me, but how many and how much will it help and how many and how much will it hurt everyone else? Many people here see things through the eyes of the not well off and the eyes of sick people. Most of those it will help but we are actually in the minority. There are a lot of people who post here due to the bad points of the current US system but those people fail to see all of the many posts here which highlight the bad points of the single payer systems, which I have pointed out in the previous post. Often you have to wait for long periods to get to see a specialist for the very first time, many doctors and providers have very long wait times, if you need surgery you often have to wait months before you can have it, options are limited including drugs - causing you to have less choices or a voice in your own care, if you are having troubles and need to get in to see your specialist ASAP you can't do it and are told to go to the emergency room for quicker care where you will be seen by someone who doesn't know the details of your case, and many times the care is just shoddier. Can these things happen in the US? Of course they can in some instances but in almost all of those cases we can tell the doctor's office to shove it and go find a different doctor. That usually can't be done in the single payer system. I know someone in the UK who's brother died due to the waiting involved in a fairly minor operation which shouldn't have been life threatening but he was not in an emergency situtation so he had to wait and wait and wait to have the surgery. He wound up dying from complications due to the long wait. Someone just recently posted here about the absolutely atrocious care they received from some country using the single payer system. From everything I have heard and seen I do not want a life like that, particularly with UC. I'll be darned if I have to wait months to see my GI and then wait for two hours in his office to see the doctor, only to have limited options and not much choice in the treatment plan. I'll take what I've got now even if I had to file for medical bankruptcy.

I don't understand why people keep on accusing me of basing my feelings out of the election hoopla. There are posts right here on this forum, almost every day, regarding all of the bad things I mentioned about other country's health systems. The care and wait times are often horrible.

My thoughts on the subject are not from stats but from real people, many of whom post on this site and some I have known personally. I don't listen to political garbage or skewed stats from either side . There have been many, many posts on this site who talk about long waits just to see the GI for the first time, long waits while at the doctor's office, less care options, having to go to the ER when you should have gone to the GI just because the wait time was too long, people having to wait months for surgeries, people having to stick with incompetent doctors because no others are readily available, etc. Many of these people are seeing primaries or ER doctors when they should be seeing speicalists but can't get in for months, and are suffering from sub standard care, mostly because primary care doctors and emergency doctors are too often having to treat specialties and they don't know what they are doing.

The one case in my previous post was from the UK. I knew this girl and her brother died from complications waiting for a common surgery for months. By the time he was bad enough to be admitted to the hospital due to the complications it was already too late. Even though there are many, many faults with the US system, especially for the poor and the sick, I certainly don't want a universal single payer system where if I need my tonsils out I have to wait for 8 months. That's ridiculous. Maybe I am mistaken but it seems like people here who are in a single payer system are more apt to just have to follow a doctor's treatment plan because they don't have any other options whereas here in the US, if you have good health insurance, you can be more involved in the decision making process, have more treatment options available, and if you aren't happy you are more apt to tell your doctor to go take a hike. I had another autoimmune disease in the past which is not an issue now. I was not happy with my first specialist so I fired him and went to a different doctors office. Even though I liked the next doctor his office was totally incompetent so I fired him too and went to third specialist's office. I was happy with him and his office. In a single payer system your options are more limited and it is harder to do something like this. You get what you get and if it is a bad doctor or a bad office you are pretty much stuck having to accept that. Of course if you are poor in the US or don't have insurance then you can get the same but why should everyone else have to suffer by forcing EVERYONE into a single payer system? The best option would be to find a way to cover only the poor and lower income better than we are doing now and finding ways to decrease health care costs for all. Middle to upper income people and those with good health insurance shouldn't have to suffer with worse healthcare just for the benefit of those who would benefit from a universal single payer system.

Just want to point out that there are many places in the US where doctor choices are limited unless you are willing to travel a long way. Many rural areas, underserved areas have a limited number of doctors or the ones who are left after the best fill spaces elsewhere. I understand health care accessibility in Canada varies according to province and area also. Some of the inequities relate to this most places, I would guess.

I thought the wiki article was balanced: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada

I sometimes wait 8 to 12 weeks for an endocrinologist appointment - especially new patient visit. GI can be 3-5 weeks sometimes. ... and I live in a city. Rural would be worse. Judy2 has good points.

I do think some of the reports about deficiencies of Canada are hyped up a bit in US because of partisan politics.