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| ▲ | victorbjorklund 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Trust me it doesn’t work perfectly in other countries. Yes, americas system is messed up but in countries like Sweden you will still have to navigate the system to actually get the healthcare you need. There are people who are denied healthcare in Sweden because the govt has deemed that it’s too expensive to save them (while people with similar conditions and a good insurance in the US are covered). | | |
| ▲ | dmix 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also inflexibility, large backlogs, quality of staff, etc. In Canada all of our best doctors go to the US and there's often nurse shortages. It's not just a private incentive either, the US gov pays out far more in public healthcare coverage as a percentage of GDP and per capita than Canada and almost all of Europe. Despite their reputation the US doesn't have a lack of public healthcare spending (ranking #1-3 in the world). It's just their system's insurance regulation is extremely convoluted, creating risky edge-cases and perverse incentives. If they fixed that they would by far have the best healthcare system in the world. |
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| ▲ | christkv 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most countries have both public and private. In Spain I have public and then private on top of that which 220 eur a month for a family of four all services included and no co-pay. The public option works to set a roof on what private insurance can charge. | | |
| ▲ | eszed 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The public option works to set a roof on what private insurance can charge. Exactly! This is what no one in the US seems to understand. My encounters with private clinics and hospitals in the UK (all 10+ years ago, at this point) were unbelievably luxurious, at prices that (totally, completely free-market driven, mind you) were affordable on middle-class incomes. Or, yeah: there's private medical insurance, also free-marketed to "shockingly reasonable", by US measures. Americans on good salaries have been bamboozled into believing that a single-payer system will trap them into some kind of hell-hole hospital° with no recourse, when in fact the exact opposite is true. --- °And, of course, the "hell-hole hospital" examples are cherry-picked. Bad on their own, of course, but not representative of a system as a whole, nor recognize that equally awful anecdotes are abundant in the USA. | | |
| ▲ | fy20 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Right, and in my country you can even mix and match it. I went to see my GP, paid for by public health, they referred me to a specialist. I chose to pay €100 to see a private doctor who was available sooner (the next day) and had better ratings. They referred me for an MRI which was done at another private provider, paid for by public health. I went back to the private doctor and paid for a non-surgical treatment, which wasn't available on public health. If that doesn't work, later I can opt for surgery, paid for by public health. And even more importantly: There is one system that tracks all diagnoses, treatment, medication etc used by both public and private healthcare providers, so medical history is available instantly to everyone. | |
| ▲ | dpkirchner an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unfortunately a lot of us do understand this, but our representatives (who definitely know this) don't care or are actively opposed to making improvements other than reducing taxes (which hurts more than helps, IMO). |
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| ▲ | ekianjo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In many countries where "universal healthcare" actually exists, you end up with waiting lists and rationed care. Choose your poison. | | | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | henrikschroder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And yet, the average American pays more in taxes for public healthcare (medicare, medicaid) that they don't receive any of, than the average European pays in taxes for (some kind of) universal healthcare. It's so bizarre seeing Americans in the debate not wanting "crazy high taxes like in Europe", because the US already spends twice as much public money per capita as the OECD average. The dirty secret of course is that healthcare as a good is much more expensive to produce in the US than elsewhere, and a large chunk of that is because the private insurance system adds a ton of unnecessary overhead. And yet all the healthcare insurance companies in the US talk about making healthcare "affordable for all". Yeah, no, they're leeches. They're rent-seekers. They drive up the cost of everything. | |
| ▲ | wang_li 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The US has a massively progressive tax system. On a net tax basis about 50% of the country pays nothing. Sure, they pay sales tax and employment taxes, but they also receive some mix of earned income tax credits, child tax credits, snap, medicaid, housing, etc. There is no real way for the US to have a single payer tax system without more people actually becoming net tax payers. | | |
| ▲ | dns_snek an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | You can't just ignore the money people are spending on healthcare right now. Every expenditure on private healthcare (insurance, copays, etc.) would be collected as tax going forward. That would be roughly $10-$20k annually? Many more people would become net tax payers overnight without actually spending more money. | |
| ▲ | sgerenser an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah this is something people in favor of single payer healthcare in the U.S. don’t want to acknowledge. In most other countries, the middle 50% of taxpayers pay a much higher percentage of their income than in the U.S. Everyone somehow thinks we can make it work just by raising taxes on “the rich” (where that is usually defined as anyone making more money than them). But if it was that easy, then why does Canada and most European countries have so much higher taxes on the middle class? Now I’m not inherently against increasing taxes (for all) if it gave us a much better healthcare system, but you have to be intellectually honest about who would have to pay those higher taxes. It’s not just Elon Musk. | | |
| ▲ | yoyohello13 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm curious what the actual number is. I have health insurance through my work and I pay over $1,500 a month for that (and still have out of pocket costs). That's $18,000 a year. That's a substantial percentage of my income which essentially is just a tax going to the insurance company instead of the government. Now if it cost a couple thousand more a year and I didn't have to worry about getting claims denied for random reasons, I'd take that deal. If it's $5,000-10,000 more a year? Then I'd have qualms. | | |
| ▲ | dns_snek 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The US spends more money on healthcare than any other country (per capita and in PPP-adjusted terms), with the lowest life expectancy out of all of its peers [1]. Make of that what you will, but that tells me that after cutting out all the corporate abuse and inefficiency, the average person should be spending about the same for similar standard of care, except without all the bureaucracy and stress. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... |
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