Comment by meowface 7 hours ago
True. The central problem described in the article is that he has cancer and doesn't want to go bankrupt from the medical bills.
I'm not a socialist and am broadly pro-capitalism, but for decades I've held a firm belief that healthcare should have a public option and people should have the ability to get high-quality medical care for $0, no matter how realistic that would be.
> True. The central problem described in the article is that he has cancer and doesn't want to go bankrupt from the medical bills.
What bills? He’s 79 so he’d have been on Medicare for the past 14 years. Sure there’s the Medicare premiums, but that’s peanuts.
You're deeply confused about the average American experience.
The simple reality is that advanced medical care is expensive.
Access to advanced medical care can either by gated by one person's wealth or by the average wealth of many people.
At the end of the day though, someone is paying and the only way to actually cost reduce is too have worse treatment.
In most of the world, private treatment is far cheaper than equivalent private treatments in the US. To the point where even to a high cost location like London, it can be cheaper to fly to London from the US to have things done at a high end private hospital.
Medicare+Medicaid in the US costs about the same person taxpayer as NHS costs per UK taxpayer. The NHS could be better, but we get universal care for a similar price than what leaves most Americans still needing private care to have any cover at all.
That strongly suggests that the US could at a minimum do far better at providing cost effective care - both public and private.
> the only way to actually cost reduce is too have worse treatment.
So tell me, why is random blood work billed for over 400$? Just to analyze the sample?
Part of the problem is definitely inflated pricing and no real transparency.
Unless you need that rockstar surgeon for that super specialty treatment that only the US can offer, the US healthcare system is just overpriced, broken and a money grab
Basic blood test should be $5. 99% of the more advanced ones shouldn’t cost more than $50.
Most medical care does not need to be advanced. It needs to be effective, but it doesn’t need to be expensive. It needs to be expensive to generate a hefty profit, though, especially when you have a serious condition - you then become a forced buyer and the market does what the market does with forced buyers without special regulations.
Or more effective treatment and not paying for ineffective ones. And less regulation and gatekeeping of which there’s a lot in the US (like needing insane levels of doctor oversight for buying medications)
The actual reason is that you'll have people going to see the doctor because their cheek's itchy (they're lonely, or clueless).
there wouldn't be any way to compete with tax pre-paid $0 point of sale health care, so there would be no option. the term "public option" is a weasel word. there would be no private option because nobody is going to choose to pay out of pocket in addition to their taxes that already pay for care.
advocate for whatever but use honest terms. you're advocating for a single payer system and there's no evading that.
The UK has both universal healthcare and private options that are far cheaper than the US.
Most universal healthcare systems coexist with private options paid separately. Some are provided by private healthcare providers, and then too tend to coexist with privately paid services.
Fwiw, a lot of European healthcare has both a public and private option. You may pick the private options because they are "better" in some ways (e.g. more modern clinics, shorter waiting times, or sometimes just better care) which still leaves some wealth gap, but usually means no one goes bankrupt to cure cancer.
Usually the medical part of it all is strictly worse in the private sector (at least in my country) because the public system has a pretty strict competitive exam to get in, whereas profit driven private companies hire the cheapest doctor they can get.
Not everybody realizes that and they often fall for the single room in the hospital.
Shorter waiting times is definitely a thing though, especially for non life threatening conditions.
> there would be no private option because nobody is going to choose to pay out of pocket in addition to their taxes that already pay for care
Every wealthy country besides Canada that provides public care is a counterpoint to this.
The father of universal healthcare by way of a state supported insurance system was Bismarck, who was far right by modern standards, and argued for it based on Christian morality, not socialism, though he was "accused" of being a "state socialist" over it, and embraced that label because it fit well with his struggle to limit the growing appeal of the actual socialists.
In European history, a lot of welfare reforms subsequently came down to Christian democrats (typically centre right to right by European standards) or cooperation between them and socialists and social democrats.
This just makes the US situation weirder - by the time socialists and trade unions gained much real power in Europe, universal healthcare was mostly already uncontroversial and settled or close to it as a result of the support of Christian groups on the right, with a couple of exceptions such as the UK, where the right wing rhetoric leading up to the NHS got pretty extreme.