cthulhuspawn82 said:
shootthebandit said:
It seems to work here in the UK and a lot of other countries. Sure the system is far from perfect and the wards arent like a five star hotel but it does the job. What is america doing so wrong that we are doing right...or vice versa?
Healthcare is just insanely expensive here, way more than any other country. I could guess at some reason why but I'm sure the root causes are a topic of discussion for more educated individuals. I just have to leave it by saying "That's how it is here"
It's why the analogies to other countries with working healthcare systems don't always work. The government cant afford to provide all its citizens with a free MRIs when an MRI costs 10 times as much as in other countries. I think its been shown that America actually spends more on healthcare than many other countries yet has less coverage, all because of prices.
I worked in medical billing for a while.
The reason costs are higher here as opposed to Europe is because of many, many reasons, the largest being our population. The US has around 300 million people, or roughly 40% of the entire population of Europe COMBINED. This causes issues with supply and demand. People end up going to hospitals for bloody noses and colds which ends up costing the hospital time and money they could be using for other things. The capitalistic nature of our society (as opposed to the more socialistic nature of European society) also means that prices go up because companies and hospitals want to make a profit and people end up paying it.
It is also a problem with how higher education is set up. Going through medical school is astronomically expensive and because the government does not pay for a large portion of high education expenses, that cost ends up coming out of pocket. So doctors end up wanting more money to cover their loans and (in my opinion) they deserve it for working so hard and so long at something like that.
It is also a case of supply markups since there are so many middle men. Everyone needs to make money. So while a bandaid might only cost .02 cents coming straight from the manufacturer, it goes through the transportation system to the distributor who marks it up to cover costs of shipping and transportation, then it goes to the hospital which marks it up to cover those costs, and before you know it, a bandaid costs $3.00.
Put all those together with many other problems I'm not really in the mood to address here and you've got yourself an expensive industry.
The way I understand it works in Europe (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that the government covers and regulates the costs of all I mentioned above so that costs stay artificially down on the surface. It is also split up among however many countries there are so no one government is covering 300 million people at once.
That's why European-style universal health care will never work in the US. There are simply too many people. The only way I see it working here is if each state were to build its own government funded paying system and then manage that individually while the federal government helps keep medical school costs down via a stipend or something. But a single payer system would collapse. I mean, we already have Medicare an Medicaid and both of those are constantly being jury-rigged to keep them simply falling over.
(V)
