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Many Americans and many politicians often do look to other countries for examples of how to do something right. The problem is we have a loud-mouthed national-pride movement that believes in American exceptionalism and can constantly think of excuses as to why Canada's system wouldn't work here, or the NHS wouldn't work here, or every other country's system wouldn't work here. We're unique, so those other systems won't work here.

We also have a large contingent of people who take immense pride in voting against their own self-interest. They'll look to Canada's system and say "yeah but they wait for days to get an x-ray for a broken arm" ignoring the fact that they themselves couldn't even afford to get an x-ray. But it's worth it because even though I can't get healthcare, the people I hate can't get it either.

As shown by the most recent election, it's political suicide to imply that America isn't the single greatest nation in the world. It's even worse to suggest that we should be asking some other country for help. Those other countries are communists, and the only communist we like is Russia.

Australian here, same opinion. It seems, watching from afar, that the american public is somehow being convinced that free health care is impossible. We have free health care here and there are some issues here and there but in general it works and is not burdensome tax wise. If you want you can pay additional for private insurance and get private coverage in private hospitals, which means a room to yourself and so on, and you can choose your doctor. In the public system you get the doctor available, but when it comes to specialists, they're the same doctors usually, because there's only so many specialists.

Recent experience - my daughter sprained her ankle, so went to the hospital for x-rays. I live outside the city so the doctor we saw was coincidentally our local GP. The price $0, time waited - about half an hour, this was on a Sunday night.

One thing that may be a factor here is the medical practices are run by doctors - no professional manager people which, from what I understand, seem to be in the US health system. The doctors, in general, really are people who want to make people well and thats what they do. Sure they like to make a buck and they do but not at the expense of everyone else.

If you let non medical people into the system to manage it then, I'd look closely at their motives, I suspect you'll find sometimes their motives aren't pure.

In the early 20th century, both Canadians and U.S. citizens formed unions to push for better living/working conditions in their country.

The difference with regard to healthcare is that Canadians convinced their government to provide it, while U.S. citizens convinced their employers.

This was fine for most of the century in the U.S., but towards the end and more recently leading up to the passing of ACA, all but the most zealous unions were broken up and employers were providing healthcare less and less.

Unlike the industrial, early 20th century where conditions were horrible for almost the entire working class, we now have some people who are gainfully employed with healthcare and some who are not. Consolidating these two groups to agree on how to provide healthcare for everyone is difficult, because those who "got theirs" don't see it as a problem until they lose it.

while U.S. citizens convinced their employers.

During WWII the government imposed wage controls.. but fringe benefits did not count as wages. And with a shortage in labor because of the war, employers used health insurance and other fringe benefits to attract workers.

The unions jumped onboard later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United...

Not entirely, right?

Employer provided healthcare is an artifact of ww2 where employee compensation was practically frozen. Employers looked for other ways to create competitive compensation, and turned to healthcare.

Mostly it was the government regulation that made employer insurance popular in US. Accident of history:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1140451...

Yes. It's absurd that this is even a debated topic when dozens upon dozens of countries around the world have successfully implemented universal health care systems which have resulted in better health outcomes than the US.

> It is really interesting how the American mindset is to never look abroad to see what works and what doesn't.

Oh we definitely look abroad. In fact that's one of the major arguments for a single-payer system in the U.S. - such a system exists successfully in every other capitalist democracy. So why can't we make it work here?

And this looking abroad is not a tonic against bad thinking. Conservatives routinely look at health systems in other countries and decry them: long waiting lists for elective procedures, high marginal income tax rates, etc., etc. Any flaw in another system is magnified and considered a non-starter.

Obamacare was based on an older Republican plan which had been implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. But in the run-up to Obamacare conservatives hyperventilated about "death panels" and how the ACA was going to destroy the economy. None of which came to pass.

> In fact that's one of the major arguments for a single-payer system in the U.S. - such a system exists successfully in every other capitalist democracy.

Every other OECD country ("capitalist democracy" is a problematic category) except Mexico has some form of universal coverage, but not all are single payer, several are hybrid public/private systems.

You're absolutely right. I often conflate "single payer" with "universal coverage", which you rightly note are not the same thing.

By "capitalist democracy" I simply wanted to point out that a country can have a healthy and thriving free market economy and universal coverage at the same time. (e.g., Germany, Japan, UK, and many more). It's a counterfactual to small-government conservative hyperbole, which holds that universal coverage necessarily destroys and disables a nation's economy.

Didn't “except Mexico” change in 2012?

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/mexico-universal-...

> "capitalist democracy" is a problematic category

A problematic category? What does that even mean?

One way the US could look to Europe is by not forcing a single one-size-fits-all solution on every state, but rather leave health care to the individual states, which allows for more experimentation, variety, and competition. This would require congress repeal ACA and replace it with no federal health care law, just like is done with Europe's central government.

https://mises.org/blog/how-us-states-compare-foreign-countri...

> There's something amusingly arrogant about it. Almost as if every other country must be an absolute cesspit that could never have any lessons to offer, although I admit that other countries' universal healthcare systems have been effectively (but unfairly) demonized in U.S. political discourse.

Everyone understands the healthcare systems in Canada and most of Europe. There is no point mentioning it because for most of Republicans it's a non-starter. It's incredibly niece of you to think a bunch of liberals have never thought to look elsewhere, at best. At worst you wanted to just blanket insult the US.