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Comment by throebd | Hacker News Reader

Would the free healthcare include only US citizens, all people who live in US, or everyone who comes to US on holiday?

If you want more affordable healthcare, you should make it cheaper, not force other people to pay overpriced bills for random strangers.

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Naturally, it would include US citizens and permanent residents, and not holidaymakers. They already need travel insurance. By the way, those plans are more expensive with US coverage than without.

Everyone should be covered for emergency care. Beyond that citizens and permanent residents should receive unlimited care and anyone with a student or work visa should also be covered for the term of their visa.

Other countries have already figured this out. And no one ever calls it “free healthcare” except for a few naive American libertarians. They don’t provide free healthcare, and if you aren’t in the system (and paying via taxes or otherwise covered via tax revenue redistribution), you’ll get a bill one way or the other (unless there is an agreement between two socialized health systems).

> Other countries have already figured this out.

None of those countries are the size of the US. Just like in Physics, you can't expect a 1/10th scale model to behave the same as the life sized version.

Japan has what...126 million people? So according to your math, America must have 1.26 billion people? Australia is as big as the US if you meant by area, plenty of other countries approach 100+ million besides Japan.

The EU has 511 million people. Sure it is multiple systems, but they all work much better than ours does.

Japan is a totally different culture than America, and their health care system is similar to ours in that it is employer paid. Also, you have no medical privacy rights, your employer gets a copy of every medical bill you incur.

Source, lived there six years and spouse was in that system for over 25 years.

Our healthcare system isn’t employer paid, it also has a large individual market (or those who can’t get access at all).

Japan, unlike the USA, has a health insurance plan for those who can’t get it through their employers (NHI, hence their system is considered universal).

I'm not sure what you mean by "our", that's ambiguous in this context. If you mean US, we don't have a "healthcare system", most health insurance is partially employer paid. My comment was not as clear as I meant it -- I meant that Japan's healthcare system is employer paid, which is similar to how most people in the US are insured. Maybe that's more clear.

Japan does also have NHI, but most are insured through their employers, as nearly everyone in Japan either works or is insured by someone in their family who works.

Are you implying that unit cost would increase at larger scale?

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