Heavy question, I know. This is not intended to be political, please leave “taxes/government evil” out of it, I’m interested in a pragmatic view.
Infamously the US has mostly private health care, but we also have Medicare and -aid, the ACA, and the VA.
Most other nations have socialized health care in some format. Some of them have the option to have additional care or reject public care and go fully private.
Realistically, what are the experiences with your country’s health care? Not what you heard, not what you saw in a meme, not your “OMG never flying this airline again” story that is the exception while millions successfully complete uneventful and safe journey story. I’m also not interested in “omg so-and-so died waiting for a test/specialist/whatever”. All systems have failures. All systems have waits for specialists unless you’re wealthy, and wealth knows no borders. All systems do their best to make sure serious cases get seen. It doesn’t always work, but as a rule they don’t want people dying while waiting.
Are the costs in taxes, paycheck withholding (because some people pay for social health care out of paychecks but don’t call it a tax), and private insurance costs worth it to you?
I live under singlepayer health care. I like it, but it does have its downsides. For example, let’s say you have something really severe going on, and you’d like to try a hail Mary. Well, you can’t, as the only treatments that are available to you are whatever treatments have been deemed effective and reasonably safe by the regulatory agency. Experimentation, in lack of a better word, is a no-go.
I never experienced this as a problem myself, but I can easily imagine that someone could.
So I think the best is to have single payer available to everyone, but with private for profit doctors available if you need or want something a little more unorthodox and you have the means to pay for it.
EDIT: Seeing as I may have come off as a bit gloomy, I think I should list why I wouldn’t want it any other way.
- My dad had cancer. Chemo and everything covered.
- My kid broke his arm this spring. The only expense was me buying a sandwich while they inserted a titanium rod into his arm.
- Same kid has ADHD. I can show up to any pharmacy in the country and fetch his meds (stock pending) without paying anything.
- His brother also has ADHD and poor eyesight on one eye. Meds and glasses covered.
- All of my kids were born in a hospital at no expense.
- I didn’t learn until last year what the hell “copay” is, and the more I learn about it, the more thankful I am that it’s not something I have to think about.
That’s why I feel like there should be both systems. Possibly public and private healthcare, but with the additional requirement that everyone has to have health insurance. Otherwise there’s going to be too much of a problem with young people not getting insurance and not paying in. You’ll also have NEETs and neckbeards who work 12 hour weeks and aren’t paying anything in to the system.
My personal horror story is that I took the time to make sure I went to an in-network hospital before I went to the ER for what ended up being an emergency appendectomy. The surgeon was in-network…for scheduled appendectomies. Emergencies were contracted out to a different organization who he was working for at the time, and that organization was not in network. So I got balance billed for it. I took the payment my insurance company gave me and sent it to him and said “look, I did all this research ahead of time and at no point did anyone ever tell me this would be out of network, so this is all you’re getting out of me.” They left it at that.
In most developed countries, health care is rationed by need. In the US we ration by ability to pay. I would gladly pay more for worse service so long as care was rationed by need.
