Hacker News Reader

Comment by afsina | Hacker News Reader

State sponsored health care is very inefficient, coercive, unfair and open to abuse no matter the good intentions. I salute Watsi and YCombinator for making this without direct state support.

View on HN

That’s a gross generalisation. The NHS in the UK for example - while far from perfect - is none of those things.

There are large amounts of coercion in care for people with mental illness or people with learning disabilities.

Things like community treatment orders are based on coercion.

This only applies to quite small numbers of people, but we can't say they don't happen.

There's also a large amount of coercion in keeping mentally ill people locked up in a prison because the government won't pay for them to receive treatment in the community, of course...

You're right that we can't say "no coercion happens in the NHS", but we can reasonably say "any coercion that happens in the NHS is orthogonal to its single-payer nature". CTOs are definitely in the grey area between the legal and healthcare systems.

Just for clarification, the NHS budget in the UK for 2016/17 was £120 billion[0], which works out to be about £1800 per person. Seems like a pretty good deal, given that in the US, health insurance for an individual would be around double that [1].

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-expenditure-...

[1] https://resources.ehealthinsurance.com/affordable-care-act/m...

$3500 a year in premiums. But that leaves out the ~$7000 deductible those plans come with.

IMO, That's too high for a family with kids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com