When they talk about the US spending more money on healthcare than other countries, I don't think they take into consideration the welfare that you mentioned. What a huge waste of time, money, and productivity.
Can we clarify once and for all: the hernia example whopper keeps citing is 5 years old and took place in a hospital which did not have a good reputation, according to whopper himself. By any account, NHS is NOT the ideal healthcare system (and quite frankly, it is being slowly destroyed by politicians that keep making headlines with new "targets" and "priorities for development") but it has come a long way from being in a desperate state that whopper seems to have experienced it years ago. Waiting lists are much shorter (again, THR is about 6 months, routine hernia is two months max), and patients have a choice of hospitals where they can have their procedures done. You can cut your waiting time further if you, say, agree to have your op done in a less popular hospital (not many do this, though).
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The people waiting a year or 6 months are paying sometimes 50% in taxes for the healthcare they are waiting for. To think that even 138 people died on a waiting list in the Netherlands, while it's not a large number, that sort of thing doesn't happen in the US to even one person.
No, I guess not...people just do not get the optimal treatment available...
🙄 Incidentally, if this is the article your are referring to (
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1729078), it is 9 years old, and it quotes 14 years old data.
Even an able bodied person in the US who could afford health insurance, but opts not to get it, wouldn't wait that long for heart surgery. And for people living in countries with socialized medicine, after they have paid 50% of their income in taxes, it doesn't leave them much money to even purchase wait list insurance
http://www.acurehealth.com/mai.aspx
I do not know how much Canadians pay in taxes. In the UK, unless you are filthy rich, you pay between 22% and 40% of your income in taxes (which pay for the NHS among other things). And most people but probably the bottom 10% of the population could buy private healthcare insurance - it does not cover any emergency treatments, so you effectively only pay for elective procedures, like THA, cataracts, hysterectomy, etc. Quite a few employers have private health insurance as an additional perk. Interestingly, I am not aware of any UK private health insurance provider that covers mental illness diagnosis and treatment - but there are several private mental health hospitals and a good scope for private outpatient practice.
Health insurance is expensive in the US, but paying an additional 10- 20% in taxes so that everyone gets insurance is a lot more expensive than buying health insurance for almost everyone being taxed.
You may well be right, however it is not clear from your post whether this is your opinion or a piece of information based on objective evidence. Any evidence?
It just seems to me that in countries with socialized medicine or a national health plan, people get worse care than the poor get in the US. They pay more taxes for their healthcare and get worse care.
I think, this is a bit of exaggeration. Look at healthcare performance indicators in the UK and the US. Infant mortality rate, for one thing. It is higher in the US (6.37) compared to the UK (5.01), the Netherlands (4.88) or Sweden (2.6) - ie, countries with socialized medicine. Life expectancy (average) is 78.7 in the UK, 78 in the US, 79.11 in the Netherlands and 80.63 in Sweden. I doubt these indicators would be as they are if people in countries with socialized medicine were receiving worse care than the poor get in the US (btw, all the numbers are from the CIA World Factbook - LOL Ok, it is not WHO, but good enough for a quick comparison). It would be more correct to say that with socialized medicine everyone gets roughly the same care independent of their income - which brings up the quality of care that would be otherwise provided to the poor, though drags down the quality of care that could have been provided to those better off. In the grand scheme of things, though, it works. Especially in countries like the Netherlands and Sweden.
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I was thinking a little bit more about the potential savings we would have if we "cut out the middle man" and the government would have to hire several more people to handle all of the claims and approve medications etc. And potentially, there would still be money left over because the CEOs make a substantial sum of money.
Oh, no. Because if you give this power to the government, they will start playing with it to promote their own political agendas. And that can't be good for it, as the potential long-term benefits may be forgone to avoid short-term discomfort - if the short term discomfort interferes somehow with the govt's prospects in the next election. Not that it seems to be much better at present, anyway...
It seems to me that many Americans have inherent mistrust in socialized medicine, and are quite strongly biased against it. Sometimes, this bias leads them to examining only selected pieces of evidence - those that may support their negative impression of the system. Socialized medicine, if managed properly, can actually be good - both for the patients and for the doctors. My parents-in-law (Americans) needed medical attention when visiting us from the US a few years back - and I did not have prescribing privileges at the time, so we had to call our GP. They were actually very impressed by the service (heck, the GP made a house call - and we did not pay a penny for it!), and are still telling their friends in the US about it.
Bottom line: less bias, more analysis.
Last time I checked with ABPN, he failed his oral boards thrice
