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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

In which countries does capitalistic healthcare work well? Or do you mean just within your theory it works well and that there are none that actually do it?

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Switzerland. Netherlands. In one ranking they are the best systems in Europe.

Do any of them not have price controls and a “public option” of some sort? And sometimes prohibition on for-profit insurance (Switzerland, for example, IIRC)?

No public option from what I know. Insurance is all private, Swiss require no profits while Netherlands allows for profit. Government subsidies and restrictions exist on the plans, similar to Obamacare.

Switzerland has compulsory healthcare, insurance subsidies for low-income people, extremely heavy regulation of health insurance companies, and many (mostly?) public hospitals.

Not exactly something I'd describe as "capitalistic health care".

40% of hospitals in Switzerland are private vs 69% in the US (21% for-profit). Most hospitals in Netherlands are private (non-profit). Both have all private insurance, although Switzerland requires it to be non-profit. Obamacare subsidizes and regulates insurance in the ways you stated, but could be made stronger. Perhaps not pure capitalistic healthcare, but a strong role for the private sector.

Netherlands has a mandate, universal healthcare, and free coverage for children up to 18, not capitalistic.

And:

>Affordability is guaranteed through a system of income-related allowances and individual and employer-paid income-related premiums.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands#...

Obamacare also provides subsidies. The point is that the provision and insurance in Netherlands is done with private organizations, not the government directly.

Switzerland and a few other countries have fully privatized medicine. You don't hear about them dying from preventable diseases.

Privatised medicine is not a free market, conflating them like this is disengenuous.

The system in India works for the middle-class and upper. They have fairly elastic supply of doctors so it balances out. Some of their surgical outcomes have higher performance than American surgeries, particularly some heart surgeries. Cheaper, faster, better.

Plastic surgery is capitalistic healthcare.

The incentives are very different. When the doctor says injections or implants will set you back $X it's not a matter of life and death. Or even health at all. You can choose to wait and save up. When the doctor says you need medical treatment that costs $X you're going to have to come up with a way to get the money even if you go broke trying. And that's assuming you're lucky/healthy enough to even be given a chance to price shop.

It's hard to go broke getting boob jobs. It's exceedingly easy (in US) to go broke getting even the most basic of health care.

Good points. When I was taken by ambulance to an out of network trauma center, I had no choice.

It worked well in the US until around 1990.

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