An average person's healthcare costs a few thousand dollars per year in EU. That includes people with innate conditions or other expensive treatments. Most of the countries have zero or only nominal out of pocket expenses.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Therefore, if you have a bad doctor or expensive care, it is your own damn fault. You just didn't try hard enough to find a good one.
It is the same thing with the debate about school vouchers vs. a standard public education for everyone. A heaping dose of "the free market fixes everything", for all life's problems.
I would rather not have a "choice". I would like to be able to select any nearby doctor, and be assured of getting competent care.
I'm not often in the situation where I have a wacky tropical disease that presents odd and incongruous symptoms, which would take a Dr. House to figure out. I am far more likely to have run-of-the-mill heart disease or a common form of cancer. I just need a doctor with some basic level of competence, who can just listen to me and help me through the common health problems of modern life.
I don't have children at all, and I don't mind paying taxes to fund schools, because when I'm old I want the doctor who is younger than to have gotten a good education. I don't expect any vouchers just because I don't have kids consuming public education.
Vouchers always seemed to me like an obvious scheme to defund public schools and let them rot, thereby punishing kids who were unlucky enough to be born poor.
So it doesn't defund public schools, but it does break the public school monopoly and allows competition among schools - they can cater to the needs of the community and experiment.
The real issue is: Why are schools failing?
When I was growing up, the vast majority of kids were educated in public schools. They weren't perfect, but they worked at least decently for the large majority of students, and did so for decades. Across the entire region. And they did that as a monopoly system you seen to despise so much.
So we had a system that worked, was scalable, replicable, and maintainable. What happened?
I don't have all the answers there, but at least once thing is clear, there is now an over-emphasis on testing. We had a system that was designed to give citizens important life skills, and turned it into a system that tries to produce drones that can pass tests.
This is exactly the kind of thing we used to criticize Asian school systems about. And now we are trying to replicate their failings. WTF
That's the thing that frustrates me about this debate. People seem to think that educating children well it's such a difficult problem, that it requires constant innovation. That it requires the "power of the free market" to solve. No, it doesn't. We have known how to do it for a long time. It just requires political will.
And that brings us to another factor, one political party is actively anti-science and actively anti-education. This was definitely not the case 30 - 40 years ago. Back then, they were both pro-public education.
Nobody really has any effective way to evaluate them, or at least, nobody does so on a broad basis or consistently. Some of them can’t pass fizzbuzz. Some of them can churn out CRUD apps, but have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to anything else. Some of them are extremely dogmatic about design patterns and tooling and ignore anything they don’t like. Some of them are inattentive or poor listeners. Some of them assume it’s Problem X they’ve seen a million times, but it’s not. Some of them are assholes. Some of them are really sharp and really engaged, but get overly excited and reinvent the wheel or spend a lot of time doing stuff that’s completely unnecessary and maybe even harmful.
I don’t know how to evaluate doctors until I see them, I have no idea if better doctors cost more or less, I doubt there’s a strong correlation because nobody else can evaluate them either. They either help me or they don’t.
I think it absolutely is necessary that I should be able to have a history and see the same doctor, and that I should be able to see another doctor any time I want for the same condition for a second, third, or fourth opinion. I have seen this be absolutely necessary for myself and others with common conditions that were resolved after seeing a different doctor.
I assume this is still possible in most if not all public health care systems (I live in the US but local doctors and hospitals are all government run, an interesting aside), but I am not sure. I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who has debilitating autoimmune disease his specialist is doing basically nothing for and he made it seem like it wasn’t possible, but I didn’t want to press.
Plus, about a quarter of Americans have “free” care already, via Medicaid and Medicare. Many of the rest have their employer hiding the true cost from them - they think the premium that comes out of their check is the actual cost. Some employers apparently even pay 100% of the premium cost.
So all these people are okay with the status quo, or even want to defend it. It’s the people on (increasingly common) high deductible plans, people with no insurance, or people who experience a catastrophic edge case (out of network provider for example) that hate it.
Also want to add: my child’s birth cost $20,000 (with insurance). When I would tell other Americans about this, the response was (usually) “you know you can get on a payment plan, right?”
The reason that Turkish healthcare is much cheaper than American healthcare is primarily because Turkish doctors are paid much less than American doctors. (As are Turkish nurses, and Turkish drug and device wholesalers, and so on.) There's a very simple solution to that. All you have to do is let Turkish doctors come to the United States and practice medicine. Or better yet let Turkish hospitals open entire branches in the United States and wholesale import their staff, equipment, and drugs from Turkey.
The reason that doesn't happen is because we have a cartel called the American Medical Association that continuously lobbies for antiquated barriers to foreign competition. Unless a physician does a residency in America (which good luck, if you're a foreigner from a foreign school), you will never be allowed to practice in the US.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...
The reforms also create a dramatic increase in bureaucracy.
For example, my daughter needs to see a specialist. I call the specialists office. I’m told there are too many patients. The doctor has to chose which to see. I need to call the primary, and have them forward my daughters info. The specialist office says she is not high enough priority and cannot be seen (my daughters condition is crippling, but not fatal as it is for others).
I call up the next specialist on the list. They are overbooked. I need to call up the primary and they a referral. I call primary again. I get referral again. Again the specialist decides not to see my daughter.
I call the next specialist … etc.
Did I mention that for some specialists the insurance info is out of date. They are not in fact in network. So once I get an appointment, I must verify with insurance they are in network.
I’LL PAY THE F*KING MONEY IF YOU GET RID OF THE BUREAUCRACY!!!
Obamacare increased bureaucracy. Clinton HMO increased bureaucracy.
I’m a highly compensated professional. My healthcare is free.
Medicare isn't public universal healthcare. The prescription plans, Medicare Advantage plans, and medigap plans are run by for-profit companies. $300-500 per month, and many good companies, like Thrivent, are getting out of healthcare completely.
https://www.livhospital.com/en/liv-branches/check-up-center
One last thing, probably there is a better English term for this but we have these government institutions in each neighbourhood. They are small and they employ 4-5 doctors and a couple of nurses that provide first level healthcare. (I would say there is a doctor for around 5000 to 10000 people) If you would go to your assigned doctor and ask for it, they do many of the blood tests at the same day and hand the results. This is a common procedure afaik and your doctor would be encouraging to do it every 12 months even if you don't ask for it.
Yes, we don't make too much money and pay about 25-40% income tax but we don't need to shill thousands of dollars for a facetime call with a doctor.
My suggestion would be to visit Turkey and spend those couple thousands USDs on check up and some nice vacation :)
They are contrasting that with their brief online sessions with their doctor that cost them $1000.
The emphasis on whole is to distinguish being the partial check up that they received for more money.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
Don't do regular checkups, they're cash cows.