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Comment by jsbaby608 | Hacker News Reader

European care is good when you're young and healthy. When you're old and need urgent surgery, it many times goes before a committee and can take many more months or even years to get approved.

I want private care with no insurance. Costs will go down to managable levels and we can still have help for people that can't afford to pay it.

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There is no “European care”. Every country has its own system and they vary greatly in aspects.

If you look through their comment history, they claim to being a white male living in the US.

The majority of his comments are pro-trump / anti-obama and have nothing to do with technology.

I wouldn't really take this person to be an expert on European healthcare.

The plain reality of healthcare is that there are a bunch of ailments, injuries, and diseases that cannot be treated cheap enough for the average citizen to be able to afford if they have the bad luck of needing that type of care.

> Costs will go down to managable levels […]

Why? Because of market mechanisms? It just means that a host of rare diseases will never become affordable, because of the basic supply and demand formula. Most people don't need care most of the time. Healthcare is not a commodity product.

Insurance solves a real problem: nobody knows if they will ever need it, but statistically we know that if everyone pitches in, everyone that does need several yearly salaries of care can get it when they need it.

This is called solidarity, and it works rather well in a large part of the world. Ideally, insurance is required and well-regulated to prevent excesses and to support the poor (and it is in many countries, including many European nations).

Private care without insurance is what we had in the past, and it basically meant that the rich could afford care, while the rest just prayed they never got anything more serious than the common cold.

> This is called solidarity

Solidarity is not a Christian value. I mean, it’s not an American value, I mean, it’s not that Jesus would help any sick person, at least he would take into account preexisting conditions.

government-run care doesn't work well for major surgery. As I said earlier, decisions are made by commitee and many people don't get the care they need.

Health insurance, like the student financial aid situation in the US, has created a situation where the true costs are inflated because the hospitals know that the average person isn't footing the bill, the billion dollar insurance company is. It's why you see $80 bills for asparin.

Your rainbows and flowers ideas about healthcare sound great in theory, but the reality is that the middleman is creating these balooning and insustainable costs. Government-run care just replaces this middleman with the government and doesn't do anything to reduce the cost or make the care better for anyone.

The US has the best quality care in the world. It's why everyone with the means comes over to the US to get treated for major illnesses. Upending the systen to make it like all of the other, worse, systems in the world isn't thr answer.

This is simply untrue. Government run health care reduces costs (by eliminating the rent-seeking middlemen in the process and by controlling costs through direct fiat if necessary) and improves outcomes. Government run health care also incentivizes the government to tax behaviors and products that have negative long-term health consequences so that it can control the eventual costs that it will end up paying.

US health care is not the best in the world and has not been for a very long time. Some people may travel to the US to see a specialist, but 10x as many Americans travel to other countries to get care that they are unable to get in the US (usually due to cost.) The US usually ends up dead last in health care among the more industrialized nations and more recently was ranked 37th in the world by the WHO. Please find me a single ranking that puts US health care at the top of the list, I could use the laugh.

The WHO list is heavily biased toward quantity of care (IE: socialized) and not quality. So, it's not really a good judge of the best quality.

If 10x Americans are getting surgery overseas because it's cheaper, this doesn't mean it's better. Our disussion is about the best quality, not on price.

Show me the studies where government-run care saves money, yet has the exact same quality as US care.

Judging outcomes and life expectancy is a red herring, because different populations have different diets, lifestyles, and genetics, which definitely leads to different outcomes.

If are sacrificing quality for cheaper care...no thanks.

I also see my mention of Surgery by committee is ignored in your comments. I'm assuming this means you know this is true. Why would I want this?

I was thinking about this too, what if there was no insurance? Or what if only the government was allowed to offer insurance?

or everybody pays a small amount into a pot, and the sick gets treated with money from that pot?

Bullshit. This sort of US right-wing talking point is completely at odds with reality. European health care is better than US health care both when you are young and healthy and when you are old and feeble. The only reason health care for the elderly in the US is not the same shitshow it is for the young is that once Americans turn 65 they finally get access to government-run healthcare.

Quality of care is higher in the US from what I've read. Though I'd much rather have the horrible non shitty payment system Europeans have

It is not higher and study after study shows this to be a fact. The US has higher costs and worse outcomes than any western European nation.

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