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Comment by fivestar | Hacker News Reader

I'm not cool with it no matter how many countries do it and the reason why is that it takes your very freedom right out of your own hands and puts it into the hands of bureaucrats. The US isn't perfect, and we have allowed oligarchs to run free and do terrible things to us, but the answer is not "more government"--we can't deal with the huge government we have now! So the argument "well, everyone else is doing it" overlooks how bad healthcare is around the world and how nations whitewash their mortality rates to hide the truth.

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You phrased it as an economic argument. I'm glad you're being honest that it's not one.

However, it's not taking your freedom away -- it's trading one kind of freedom for another: the freedom to not pay for collective welfare for the freedom from your (or your dependent's) health being used coercively during labor negotiations or to extract rents.

On balance, I think that the freedom to have less social responsibility is less useful than the freedom to be healthy regardless of employment status or job transitions, particularly since it saves me money.

I have more money to spend (because of less rent extraction from healthcare) and am freer to pursue my economic goals (because I am less dependent on an employer for my health).

To me, it simply sounds like I'm freer by having socialized medicine.

With the UK solution for example you can still get private health insurance if you feel like it and many of the better off do.

You can just look at UK and you can see that things can be done better. Or Canada...

The NHS is constantly on the verge of collapse.

But never actually collapses.

It hasn't yet, since the taxpayer props it up.

Of course the taxpayer props it up. It is a taxpayer funded system. That is like saying that the taxpayer "props up" the military or the court system.

You can downgrade the military to some extend if costs keep rising, what of the NHS?

You can obviously (i) downgrade the range of treatments that the NHS will pay for, (ii) increase its funding, or (iii) do a do a bit of both.

When you can no longer do (ii), you start to do (i).

But since no one wants either, the pressure usually ends up on doctors. If there is an exodus from the public sector, instead of a slow downgrade, then it will collapse.

edit: the original point is that the US should have a system like the UK - but is the NHS even sustainable?

The NHS is more sustainable than the current US system by virtually any conceivable measure. In fact, the one thing that every political party in the US agrees on is that the system cannot continue in its present form.

The problem of rising healthcare costs is a real one, not an artefact of a particular system, and there is no easy fix for it.

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