paulbj2

6 hours ago, mommysboy said:

 

Yes. I like what you say.  Certainly, I think Canada and USA has such a benefit. UK and Australia- I don't think so.

 

It needs to said though: this could have been cured without extreme cost, but the Thai authorities would not do it.

 

So you need to know where you stand.  Personally, I think if you don't have substantial cash or a good policy, then you really need to factor an unfortunate premature death in to the equation, because it's likely going to happen sooner or later.

 

It's very short sighted of Thai authorities given the money they make from tourism.  More bad publicity.

 

In the USA, it seems to vary; I guess it depends who you are insured with. Most American visitors to Thailand that I know over here are not covered by their US insurers. Canada I don't know but Australians and Brits are definitely not covered by their healthcare systems; the UK being one of the exceptions to the EU rule.

I guess covering us old folks would be very expensive for the Thai government and that's why they won't do it at any price. I had a chat about this kind of thing with my cardiologist in Luxembourg and he pointed out that, in Luxembourg, on average, the medical spend during the last 24 months of a patient's life is the same as the sum spent for the whole rest of their life aside from the last two years. I found this astonishing but he swore it was correct.

1 minute ago, redwinecheese said:

He was a rational human being.

He'd been living somewhere hot so he had a credible, suntanned ruddy complexion such as you might get from sleeping under the stars.

41 minutes ago, freebyrd said:

Pretty much the same for us Brits. I paid NHI for 20 years, entitles me to nothing in the UK or in Asia once I relocated.

A British friend of mine was living outside the UK and had no medical insurance at all, anywhere. He had been out of the UK for 15 - 20 years then was taken seriously ill and needed major long term medical treatment for a cancer that eventually killed him. He went back to the UK and when they asked him where he had been living and why he wasn't registered with a GP, he simply said he had been a traveller and living rough for years in England and they took his word for it and treated him on the NHS. RIP!

9 minutes ago, happysanook said:

Sad. <200B at any pharmacy would have taken care of that infection.

Wishful thinking I fear! Chronic ulcers can be extremely difficult to treat; often fail to respond to antibiotics and can eventually result in the need to amputate the limb.  

2 minutes ago, Dustdevil said:

"Greed is good" is simply a cruder way of stating the profit motive is what drives economies, without which we wouldn't have an economy. Without the production and marketing of goods and services, none of us would be enjoying any kind of middle class life. The world would be one big North Korea--or Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Too simplistic by far! The world is not black or white; there is space between rampant, out of control, Trump-ist capitalism and the sort of despotic dictatorship represented by North Korea. Examples would be countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands where, due to the tax system, the wealth gap is very much narrower than in say the USA. Additionally, in those countries, people are healthier and happier (or at least claim to be) than is the case in the US.

5 minutes ago, little mary sunshine said:

Very fortunate!

2 minutes ago, Dustdevil said:

That is correct. Also, using the term "social security" suggests he's American. US basic social security does not reimburse foreign medical bills, but the Plan F Supplement, which is not expensive, does reimburse 80% of foreign medical treatment. 

I guess like most systems, that is predicated on being a US resident and being overseas on vacation, rather than leaving the country permanently

1 hour ago, Thaidream said:

I am not suggesting the UN pay for healthcare- this is the responsibility of the country where a person resides. I am suggesting a UN conference of all members in which a reasonable approach to healthcare is discussed and agreed upon.  There are several ways that travellers/non citizen residents could be covered.  The conference could agree to let non citizens buy into their national health scheme; there could be a worldwide small charge on every airline ticket sold that goes into a Worldwide fund; their could be agreement that one country can  bill another countries medical care system. 

If the Un conference could simply agree that health care is a human right and discus the solutions and then implement a plan the World would be much better off than the current systems.

"... there could be agreement that one country can  bill another countries medical care system." which is exactly how the system works inside the EU, I believe!

17 minutes ago, little mary sunshine said:

My friend, an American, told me He paid into US Medicare since the

1960's....50 years...now He lives in Thailand, absolutely NO medical Insurance

if you retire outside The US....fortunately, He is in good health and has put 

about $75,000 US in a medical savings account in case of major medical

expenses, after that is gone, He plans to return to The US where He will be

covered for 80% of the bill....Doesn't seem at all fair!

Same applies to most countries. You only get cover under the French, Belgian, Dutch, German and Luxembourgish systems if you are a resident in the country and continue to pay into the system. 

However, as a holidaymaker, at least the systems in those countries do give you full cover for illness and accidents regardless of pre-existing conditions and regardless of how off your head you were at the time, if you had an accident. I can vouch for the Luxembourg system; in 2014, I came here on holiday and ended up at the hospital twice in a month due to illness. The Luxembourg "Caisse National de Santé" refunded to full cost of both visits when I returned home.

 I'm originally from the UK and the last time I was there, last year, I found it to be unthinkably expensive compared to Thailand. A meal in any sort of decent restaurant is going to cost you £20+/head (say 900 Baht). Petrol and diesel cost an arm and a leg; twice what it costs here, so does a pint in a pub. I suppose if you confine yourself to Wetherspoons in the UK and only eat western style food over here, the cost of living might be just about comparable but in any other circumstances, certainly not! I manage to live quite comfortably on half my pension here and I most certainly would NOT be able to do that in the UK or in any other place in western Europe!    

11 minutes ago, fstarbkk said:

Again, I can find no evidence that the subject of this thread was suffering either from diabetes, heart disease or any other disqualifying condition. So what's your point?

Leg ulcers of the type shown in the photo are a very common complication of Type II diabetes. This is a disease that frequently goes unnoticed until it has already done some serious damage to the sufferer. Diabetic retinopathy, cataracts, impotence, leg and foot ulcers, circulatory problems and diabetic neuropathy are just some of the complications of this now very common disease. The commonest cause of Type II diabetes is being overweight or obese. If you are significantly or substantially overweight, a simple, low cost, blood test will determine whether or not you have the illness and it's worth getting it done as early diagnosis improves the prognosis enormously. Treatment is pretty effective, these days, and is preferable to leaving it to run its course unless you really want to go blind or have one of more limbs amputated or both!

3 minutes ago, mommysboy said:

 

In retrospect a lot of us, myself included, should not be here on economic grounds.  But it is fair to say money was a lot easier to earn a few years ago, and then of course we met a lady, got married and perhaps had a kid or two. What are we to do? 

 

You speak perfect sense of course, and now I would say only the very well healed and unattached should live in Thailand, which is increasingly not a cheap place to live anymore.

 

Somebody who has lived here for a few years may find it very difficult to re-establish themselves in their home country.  In the UK, whilst day to day expenses are actually on a par now with Thailand, the cost of housing is sky high, and you have to pass credit checks and put sown hefty deposits.

 

There is perfect sense, but it flies in the face of the reality for ordinary people.

1 hour ago, YeahSiam said:

Frankly, I think that once you're over 70, hospitals should be under no obligation to treat you if you don't have insurance.

People are supposed to live, grow old, become sick and then die - extending life at all costs is BS; euthanasia should be decriminalised.

Uninsured, infirm old people are a massive, massive burden on the healthcare system.

If you have the funds to cover your care past 70, then live on, bro - but if you don't, it shouldn't be the state's responsibility to keep you ticking over.

Many civilized countries do practice euthanasia: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland; however it is voluntary, it's not imposed on people just because they can't pay for continuing treatment. 

It would certainly make Thailand a more welcoming retirement destination if the government allowed legitimate retirées (i.e. those with "retirement visas") to buy into the social security system at a rate that acknowledged this group's high level of usage of medical facilities but at the same time that was more affordable than private insurance policies.  

4 minutes ago, Suradit69 said:

But it isn't regardless ...

 

When there was discussion about requiring tourists and foreign residents to pay for or have proof of medical insurance there were howls of protest on TV.

 

If you're traveling you should have insurance coverage and if you decide to settle in Thailand you should face the fact that medical needs have to be planned for. Waiting until you get sick or have an accident and then carrying on about poor me and someone should give me care for free,  is just irresponsible. 

 

It's tragic that this man died, although it apparently had nothing to do with his infected leg (which had been treated). If he had survived the accident he would have been treated in hospital, but whether or not he could pay for it, someone would have to.

 

One of the things that affects the prices we all have to pay for medical treatment is the provision that hospitals have to make to cover the cost of treating people who can't pay. If you want to pay for those without funds or insurance, then please step forward with cash in hand the next time some foreigner is reported in hospital with hundreds of thousands in unpaid bills.

 

Even in western nanny states medical treatment for non-residents/citizens is limited or non-existent.

 

 

"Even in western nanny states medical treatment for non-residents/citizens is limited or non-existent."

Who told you this? I don't know of one single "western nanny state" where something like this would not have been treated on a "treat first, ask questions later" basis and by the way I have lived in quite a number of western nanny states!!

This is a world wide problem that requires a visionary, international solution.

People visiting Thailand or indeed anywhere else in the world, from most (but not all) EU countries are automatically covered by the healthcare provider in their home countries. The only private insurance that these people need is against the risk of serious injury or illness that requires specialized medical repatriation. Is it beyond the wit of governments worldwide to get together and arrange some sort of fall-back medical cover that would these sorts of situations arising?

5 hours ago, dotpoom said:

Hopefully the dog would be free of rabies?

Cats too are subject to rabies infections but the most widespread carriers, in western Europe at least, are bats. The only person to die of a locally acquired rabies infection in Britain in recent years, was a guy working in bat conservation who was scratched by a trapped bat during a capture and survey programme.  He had declined the prophylactic vaccination against rabies that is always offered to people working with wild bats.

2 hours ago, chiang mai said:

A real estate developer with no prior political experience, what could possibly go wrong!

I think maybe that should be a FAILED real estate developer. His Atlantic city ventures were a catastrophic failure resulting in his company's bankruptcy together with the failure of a lot of his suppliers who were never paid many of whom were small businesses. 

Experts have calculated that if he had simply invested the fortune that he inherited in a decent fund like Berkshire Hathaway, he would be richer today even than he claims to be; although a lot of experts reckon he is worth an awful lot less than he claims.

11 hours ago, Gary A said:

 

At the time I was living in the US with a BOA Visa card attached to my PayPal account. I was here on holiday and ordered something. I got a notice that my account was limited. It wouldn't allow me to sign in to contact them. Other attempts to straighten it out via email resulted in canned computer messages and instructions to log in. Catch 22, I couldn't log in. My account wasn't limited, it was totally frozen. To hell with PayPal. I decided that they have no people working there, only computers.

 

ADDED - I was using a US credit card and the shipping address was to my home in the US. Apparently since the order was placed here in Thailand, the computers got confused and I had no one who I could talk to.

Ah yes. I tried to order something from here in Thailand using my Paypal account to pay and I was informed that I couldn't as Thailand is not an approved destination for orders from my account.

The problem you had logging in from here is a relatively common one that can be solved by using a VPN or proxy server that makes you appear to be in the US  or wherever you need to appear to be.

If you use a Visa agent, go ask them if they can suggest somewhere or even if they can introduce you to a bank. I was introduced to a bank by a guy who takes loads of Farangs there and I was treated more or less like royalty. In Thailand, who you know matters much more than what you know. If you get yourself "presented" to the bank by an existing account holder of good standing, you may find the whole process much easier.

3 hours ago, RayD said:

Xaos

Both my accounts were obtained with a multi O and an immigration address certificate no problem at all. The AC is only required if you don't have a work permit to certify your address. Opening an account without a WP or AC is at the discretion of the bank, but with one they will just go ahead and do it.

 

If Paypal have blocked your debit card, just get a new one from KTB and it will have a different number. If they're blocking you by name then a new account won't help.

 

I'm wary of SCB after they insisted I need a credit (not debit) card to go on line. It's probably not true but I don't trust them now.

 

What do you have to do to get blocked by PayPal for Christ's sake?

I was able to open a bank account with just a 30 day visa exemption. It all depends on the branch and on the manager in that branch. With my account came the inevitable Passbook and a Visa debit card that works everywhere in the world that I have tried to use it and I don't recall having paid anything extraordinary in the way of fees for the privilege - a hundred or two maybe but absolutely NOT 1000s of Baht!

I'm with Bangkok Bank BTW. 

On 10/01/2017 at 1:43 PM, Thaidream said:

A computer is a machine controlled by a person. I cannot tell you the number of times that a company has told me they cannot do anything about an issue because 'the computer will not allow it".  Absolute BS.  I understand very well how the airline systems work - however- with a human intervention- the prices at this time can be stabilized at a much lower level to assist people fleeing the flooding to reach their destination. The airlines can bring in more equipment to also ease the backlog. No one is asking for free seats- just a little compassionate pricing. It's called being a good corporate citizen,

I don't know what planet you live on! I used to design these sorts of systems and the scenario goes.

Management: "Great! Your automated system is up and running and works like a charm"

Me:   "Well, yes the core of the system is tested and running just fine but before we go live, we still need to do some work on manual override and other support and safety systems"

Management:   "No, no, no! Look we go live straight away and we keep the old system that you are replacing in working condition so that if anything goes wrong, we simply revert to the old system, OK" 

Me:   "...but it's not as simple as that..."

Management: "Look I am already late for another really important meeting! Let's pencil in next Monday for a full live roll-out of your new system. It's brilliant; the top management is really pleased with what you have achieved"

Me: "MONDAY!!! You have to be joking"

Management: "Don't start getting negative. I know you can do it! Go for it Tiger! Must go - really late"

A month after "go-live" the rest of the budget is pulled and so the manual override and and other support systems never get written. A year later the old system is quietly shut down and the staff who used to run it are reassigned or made redundant so there is no way back!

That's much more like the reality.

23 hours ago, SunsetT said:

.....Soon to merge with Ryanair.....

The price of airline seats is largely determined by computer systems these days and is based mostly on demand on a particular route, generally, along with percentage of capacity sold on a particular flight. Pricing policy and thus system behaviour varies from airline to airline. Thus, if demand is high because of the flooding, then, without human intervention, the systems will deliver high ticket prices because that is what they are programmed to do! This has nothing to do with profiteering, it is simply the way that systems are designed to operate.

Another thing that the general public may not be aware of, is the fact that many airlines, probably the overwhelming majority of airlines on busy routes sell more tickets than there are seats on the aircraft. An airline, for which I worked years ago, had an artificial intelligence system that combined data from many different sources including weather reports, daily traffic density and road works, known reliability details of regular passengers (certain passengers are more apt to cancel or no-show than others depending on what they do for a living, where they have to come from and so on) and a whole host of other variables to arrive at a "calculated oversell percentage"; that is to say the percentage beyond 100% capacity in each class that the airline could sell that would be covered by no-shows and last minute cancellations. This is less of an issue in Economy but very big money in Business Class and First Class where tickets are being sold at premium prices. This is why it is not uncommon for passengers to be asked if they will accept a later flight, financial compensation, an upgrade, a huge stack of air miles or any combination of those not to fly on a particular service. The overbooking system got it slightly wrong and there are more passengers hoping to board than than seats on the aircraft!

The accuracy of the predictions of this system was quite phenomenal, more than 95% correct and it was well worth the airline compensating the odd passenger very generously as the extra profits they generated by using it more than covered the compensation.

A copy of that system cost $10 million back in the 1990s, if you were a competitor airline. When the big alliances where put together, the one thing every airline wanted was the right to buy a copy of that system.

41 minutes ago, farcanell said:

 

Yep.... a bullet fired at an angle is definitely more deadly... no contest.... I read a lot of posts on here, by people with a lot of gun exposure, and ended up doing at lot of reading on the topic as a consequence of that input (thanks go to posters such as deerhunter)

 

but... there are cases reported where verticals shots have killed people.... so they are lethal

 

medical studies  have found that an object traveling at 200kph will pierce a human skull... this is about the speed achieved by a tumbling small caliber bullet, I believe (61 m/s)... probably far less speed is required if the skull belongs to an infant or child, with an undeveloped skull (remembering that were these rounds land is indiscriminate)

 

Further, in practice, I agree, a vertical shot in its pure essence, is an unlikely shot, all experts agree on this.... so loosely termed, shooting into the air will rarely be a truly vertical shot, making it more dangerous than a truly vertical shot

 

celebratory gunfire that I have seen, sprays all over the place... these are all potential killer shots.

 

summary... rounds discharged into the air, can unintentionally kill, regardless of angle

I think we all agree on one thing; you have to be a total moron or a three year old in a (wo)mans body to do stupid shit like this and risk other people's lives.

On 02/01/2017 at 5:21 PM, farcanell said:

 

Really?

 

ive seen free style skydivers accelerate to near 500kph in competition... I would think a bullet would go faster.

 

your last posts suggest you agree that a vertical shot, when coming downwards, is still lethal, which I am agreeing with.... I just haven't bothered doing any calculations, which would have to factor in caliber /bullet weight... muzzle velocity to determine height achieved going upwards, before calculating downward speed etc etc

 

perhaps you might give that a go.... in the meantime, I will maintain that a bullet discharged upwards, will land at a very fast speed.... certainly enough to kill

I did a bit of research on this and apparently a round fired absolutely vertically is not, in fact, lethal as apparently the bullet starts to tumble on the way down and that limits it's terminal velocity. The really dangerous ones are the ones fired at an angle as the spin induced by the rifling and ballistic trajectory are fully maintained and those are the rounds that regularly kill people. Having said that a round fired truly vertically will be a rarity and thus all rounds fired into the air should be considered to be potentially lethal.