I've never heard of anyone being forced to wait for weeks for this kind of stuff in a normal hospital in the US. Government run health systems overseas have well documented wait lists.
Furthermore, privately run systems should be more efficient because consumers have a choice. Don't like your current doctor? Go get a new one. To be clear, I don't object to government funding these things, just running them. Monopolies are bad.
Every country in Europe has a private healthcare industry in addition to the public one. Not only is there no "waiting list crisis", but people still have the ability to choose whatever private healthcare provider they want, provided they can pay for it.
As a European who only recently moved to the U.S., it's bizarre to see the rhetoric being used here. The news are littered with "Europe is on the brink of collapse", "Will the Eurozone survive?", and "Healthcare waiting lists longer than ever in Europe", but mention those headlines to most Europeans (at least in Northern/Western Europe), and they'll look at you quizzically before asking what you've been smoking. And indeed, nearly every study into healthcare systems and their effectiveness prove many of those headlines to be wild exaggerations or downright untruths.
Consider if you should take what you're reading at face value--very large corporations are heavily incentivized to mislead you. Manufacturing Consent is chillingly relevant.
So poor people can suffer in the public hospitals and rich people can buy the very best care their money can provide? How is that a good thing?
I seriously don't understand what's wrong with a system where the government gives people money to participate in a truly free market (see comment in a sibling reply about how the US market is not currently free). This is the best system: everybody is covered and there's no big, lumbering, inefficient government running the show.
Because healthcare shouldn't ever be a free market.
A free market implies that a doctor should be charging as much as he can get for a procedure in order to maximise his profits. Standard econ 101 stuff. However, when someone is dying, they'd happily spend every penny they have even if it's just for simple cheap antibiotics. Therefore, you can't let the standard "the price is what people are willing to pay" economics take control. Healthcare cannot ever be a free market in a just, moral society.
That's not to mention the socio-economic aspect of the healthcare system. If people are dying simply because a procedure is being charged at its free market value, then the poorer end of your workforce will be decimated. And yet, the poorer end make up the vast majority of jobs! Socialised healthcare of some sort is absolutely essential to a well functioning society.
The obvious counter argument is that I could pay for my highly skilled, valuable workers to have private healthcare. The free market at work! But what about the people who don't work for me yet are essential to my business? How do I ensure the guys who build and maintain my roads survive that potentially dangerous job? How do I ensure that the guys who take my trash out are covered? These are all fairly low paying jobs where the downward wage pressure would push them into not being covered.
Yet these people are absolutely essential to my business running.
Then there's my customers. I try and sell to all walks of life, rich and poor. Where's my market if all the poor are dying due to not affording healthcare?
/rant over
There's just so many reasons why free market healthcare is bad. Socialised healthcare isn't just good morally, it's good for business too.
I don't think that you understand "econ 101" as well as you think you do. If markets worked like you described, nobody would be able to afford to buy anything. Yes, suppliers try to maximize the price they get for what they're selling but somebody has to pay for it. That's what drives the price down - if almost all the doctors charge $x for something and one guy charges $x-1, all the sudden people start flocking to him and he makes more money. In a truly competitive market, long term profits are zero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition) because everybody sells their goods at exactly what it costs to manufacture them because that's the only way to sell any units at all. Of course I'm not claiming that health care can be perfectly competitive - there are many reasons why it can't be. But there's no reason why the current market needs to be noncompetitive.
Furthermore, as I've said up and down this thread, I'm not opposed to funding poor people's private care through government subsidy. The important piece is that the people participate in the free market and can choose how to use the money - not where the money comes from. This is how this discussion started in the first place - I believe the government should just give veterans money for health care instead of trying to actually provide it.
Having one central administration for a whole sector of the economy is inefficient. The Soviets thoroughly proved this with their (mis)adventures in central planning. Fostering free markets aren't just good morally, they promote better outcomes for patients and more innovation in the sector.
The market isn't the solution to every problem, it is in fact sometimes immoral to solve a problem with the market because money is sometimes not the correct incentive. Healthcare should not be a free market issue, the quality of your care should not depend on the depth of your wallet, nor should it be profitable to deny service to those in need of them.
Poor people don't suffer in public hospitals in Europe. Also, in most countries, the government pays for specialty private care when necessary (it often isn't, since doctors make a very good living in the public system.)
> Furthermore, privately run systems should be more efficient because consumers have a choice. Don't like your current doctor? Go get a new one.
You are assuming an efficient market. That would imply that patients have access to perfect information about quality and cost of care, and make decisions rationally. I find this extremely questionable.
> Monopolies are bad.
I am far from convinced that the US health care system is competitive in any meaningful sense of the word.
> I've never heard of anyone being forced to wait for weeks for this kind of stuff in a normal hospital in the US.
This is not evidence that the US health care is more efficient, it is evidence that the US makes a different trade-off in cost:quality of care. Without question, a subset of the US population receives better care for non-emergency medical issues. But also without question, this improved service comes with a substantial increase in cost.
Hospital capacity is extremely expensive. A Canadian (say) hospital operates at nearly 100% utilization, nearly 100% of the time. In order to do this, it must maintain queues for non-emergency care, in order to smooth demand. By comparison, in order to avoid queueing, an American hospital must maintain capacity to satisfy peak demand, which means it does not fully utilize its capacity most of the time. Both systems maintain large bureaucracies (I have been party to Canadian health care workers marvelling at how an American hospital might dedicate an entire floor to its billing department). Which is more efficient? This is hard to say. Do Americans have the freedom to choose where they stand on the cost:quality-of-care spectrum? It seems not, to me.
> Without question, a subset of the US population receives better care for non-emergency medical issues. But also without question, this improved service comes with a substantial increase in cost.
I'm not convinced that even this is a given: A large percentage of those costs are the result of articial inflation that benefits pharmaceutical and insurance companies tremendously, but costs the average American a fortune. A month's worth of chemotherapy in the U.S. can easily cost ten times more than the equivalent in any European country (not factoring in insurance.)
The rich getting quality care never seemed a particularly convincing argument against healthcare overhaul. It's even more ridiculous when you consider that there is world-class private healthcare in Europe as well.
I never said the current US system is efficient. Go back and check. In the current system, people don't chose their own medical plans - their employer does. If you lose (or leave your job), it's hard to get good, affordable health care. Further, each state has their own laws about what health care providers must provide - and people can't buy across state lines. Also, many people are on Medicare, in which the government essentially dictates that price to the hospitals/doctors that it will pay for things.
What I favor is a free market system, where everything is run privately. This can be funded through taxation and income redistribution if needed, as long as people are free to choose their hospitals, their doctors, their treatments, etc. The government shouldn't make any demands on what people need to buy for health care coverage.
Of course, contract law and medical safety standards still need to be enforced.
Okay, I live in France, the quintessential socialized health-care system. The wait at hospitals is short, I can choose my doctor as I please, and an appointment costs me all of 23 euro. I have nothing against the health insurance being government-run, which does not entail that the whole system is government run. Most GPs, for instance, are independent.
Adding to my previous comment: the French health "insurance" is a bit of a misnomer. It is as much an insurance as a wealth redistribution mechanism, and the "premiums" are not a function of your health risks but of your income, i.e. it is effectively a tax. If you believe that health-care should be granted at the same level regardless of material status, it makes sense.
In other words, the French health "insurance" is meant to at most break even, or run a deficit (which it does).
Wait times in normal hospitals in the U.S. only include those people who can afford medical care (including those with insurance). They don't include the millions of people who can't get on the list at all.
In other words, average U.S. wait times are pretty good if you exclude people whose wait times = infinity.
> I've never heard of anyone being forced to wait for weeks for this kind of stuff in a normal hospital in the US.
That's because here they can't afford healthcare at all and they just die. Seriously, criticizing better healthcare systems for problems that don't exist while ignoring all the worse problems with our system, c'mon.
You're spewing the same ignorant bullshit you'll find on Fox News; you're brainwashed.
This is a ridiculous statement. Only around 15% of the country is uninsured and only a small percentage of that number would be "dying" at any given time. Most people in that number are young and relatively healthy. There aren't huge masses of people dying in the streets from treatable diseases and if that's what you believe, you ought to go outside more often.
Regardless, as I've repeatedly said, I'm not arguing for the status quo. The status quo is bad. We do not have a free market currently. If we decoupled health insurance from employers, provided subsidies to the poor, elderly, and our veterans, and removed ridiculous restrictions that prohibit purchase of insurance across state lines we would be well along the way to having a system with universal coverage without the drawbacks of central planning.
This isn't "ignorant Fox News bullshit". Central planning has been repeatedly tried and proven to be less successful than the market mechanism we trust with every other sector of our economy. We simply can't anticipate supply and demand as efficiently as humans as the market (as a force of interacting people) can. I'm not trying to spew some reactionary propaganda - for Christ's sake, I'm advocating the government give people subsidies to help them get insurance in this proposed truly free market. Free market doesn't mean no government or even no government regulation.
The claim that I'm brainwashed carries significantly less weight when you've ignored my comments up and down this thread.
> This is a ridiculous statement. Only around 15% of the country is uninsured and only a small percentage of that number would be "dying" at any given time.
You ought to stop relying on your gut so often and look at actual data. 45k people[1] a year in this country die from lack of healthcare. The only thing ridiculous here is you.
> Central planning has been repeatedly tried and proven to be less successful than the market mechanism we trust with every other sector of our economy.
In regards to healthcare, absolutely false; socialized systems in the world work far better than market based systems, this is simply a fact.
> I'm advocating the government give people subsidies to help them get insurance in this proposed truly free market.
Subsidies are a shit solution to any problem, they don't work in free markets because markets simply raise prices to feed off the subsidies. See college tuition rates.
The life expectancy in the United States is lower than most European countries, but not that much lower (e.g., 81 for the UK, 79.8 for the US). I suspect much or all of this would go away if you controlled for overweight, violent crime, motor vehicle accidents, etc.
The data is not consistent with masses of people dying in the streets because they can't get medical care.
No one said mass people in the streets, and the data shows 45k people a year dying[1] from lack of healthcare. So stop looking at life expectancy and trying to infer deaths from that and just look at the data on deaths from lack of healthcare. It's been studied, no need to try and infer it.
So the US has lower life expectancy despite spending more per capita than any other country?
> controlling for overweight
I'm not sure what this means. Removing all the over-weight related illnesses obviously reduces death rates, but so what? Obesity causes chronic problems and not treating those health problems causes death.
Life expectancy isn't the only measure. Convenience and speed also count, when it comes to quality of life. That's why you see (e.g.) wealthy Canadians crossing the border to get treated.
"I'm not sure what this means."
The United States has a higher rate of obesity than many other countries. Similarly, it has high rates of violent crime and motor vehicle accidents. These likely account for some of the difference in lifespan, but are not (as far as I can tell) directly related to the presence or absence of socialized medicine.
Anyway, we have Obamacare now, so everything is wonderful, right?
Obesity and the health problems caused by onesity are treated by healthcare. The lack of affordable healthcare has an impact on treating those problems. Diabetes kills people (eg diabetic foot) so giving people access to healthcare means they are more able to control these chronic illnesses and more able to avoid mortality associated with those problems.
I'd agree the Canadian system sucks.
But if being a destination country for "health tourism" is a good thing then England appears to be a great system.
It's hard to see how it ever could. How do you know which is the best doctor or hospital? You don't. You can't. You could if you had an education in medicine and had worked at all the hospitals but obviously that doesn't happen. Besides, patients often don't have time for window-shopping.
How do you know which is the best doctor or hospital?
That isn't really the problem we're trying to solve. As a patient, I'd like to receive adequate health care. I don't imagine that my health is somehow more important than that of every other patient in the nation. That isn't to say I wouldn't like more information about health care providers, but maybe I can't be trusted with that...
Furthermore, privately run systems should be more efficient because consumers have a choice. Don't like your current doctor? Go get a new one. To be clear, I don't object to government funding these things, just running them. Monopolies are bad.