Google offers a lot of free services. Can they figure out how to make healthcare free?
Google offers services that you don't pay for in cash.
It's so easy to blame voters but the reality is that politics is about messaging, and how is the electorate supposed be savvy enough when these companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to keep us fighting each other about this stuff? Make no mistake, Google benefits from this depravity too.
I don't have a good answer to this question, I'm wondering if others do.
No, I don't have an answer either. I just know that counter-propaganda isn't it.
Maybe things were different under the Fairness Doctrine? I don't know.
We already have free health for the poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
> Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 74 million low-income and disabled people (23% of Americans) as of 2017, as well as paying for half of all U.S. births in 2019.
What we should be doing is to fight the regulatory and bigpharma capture of US health system along with the horrible hospital + insurance racket. Google is now going to take advantage of the moat built by Big Gov and never ever allow anyone to compete.
No, we have free health insurance for some of the poor (states that have no accepted the ACA expansion have basically no coverage for adults without dependents.)
Medicaid is not (as a generality) free health care (it can be, in some states, for some recipients). It is free health insurance, which can have copayments, coinsurance, deductibles, etc.
I think if someone can afford better, private care they should be able to. For example I would probably go to the universal healthcare family doctor but if I need a specific surgery I would like to be able to go to the best care I can get.
There are tens of millions of people who have no access to Medicaid because states chose not to expand it under the ACA, and there are plenty of poor people who make more than ~$16k a year, which is the cut-off for Medicaid.
How could it be even more expensive than our current inefficient, half-baked, worst of both worlds system, which is more expensive than socialized systems in other nations? And more expensive per capita, not simply overall.
* The US spends more public money on health care, per capita, than other wealthy nations, while also spending much much more private money than other wealthy nations
* By many measures, the US gets worse outcomes (e.g. life expectancy)
The conclusion that many draw from this is that perhaps a single-payer health care system in the US could dramatically lower private spending, also lower public spending, and perhaps improve outcomes. I don't personally know if that follows, but it's not implausible.
This is counter-intuitive to many, thus comments like your (A) through (C) are common, but might not be correct.
That said, I'm not aware of evidence that your (B) is wrong. That might be part of the trade-off.
As a non-American from America's hat, who has had a few (bigco-insurance-funded) run-ins with US Healthcare, my observations were that
* emergency health care at the no-expenses-spared level in the US was nicer than emergency healthcare up here, and I wouldn't want to pit my doctors vs those US doctors in a quality competition
* US doctors seemed really eager to waste money, like really eager, like it was creepy
Your last point is purely a function of the liability culture in the states. US physicians are quite aware of what's appropriate and what's inappropriate testing wise. However, as long as a physician can be held personally liable for any oversight - meaning that the results of an entire career can be lost - they're going to over-test.
I'll note that I do have a few different bits of modest evidence to the contrary. But I wanted to focus my comment on concrete observations (both the large-scale statistical kind, and the personal anecdotal kind), rather than on speculation.
I'd much rather a doctor "waste money" on a test than come up with an incorrect diagnoses based on symptoms only.
[1] "works" is an interesting point because it isn't clearly defined, and usually means different things to different people.
Ever experience of the system is "unique" - there is this mix of human patient with human provider with finite resources with medical knowledge with time. So there are plenty of examples of long waits, bad service, unfavorable outcomes, even death. It's not hard to cherry pick bad experiences here.
No health system will make everyone live forever. Death comes to us all sooner or late. But universal healthcare works in many places in raising the overall standard of public health, without bankrupting people in the process.
Given that its always spending limited money, and only scales at human rates, its far from perfect. But, at least for some, its better than a "health care level based on your wealth" system.
You have Medicaid for the poor, heavily subsidized Obamacare for the people who don't get it through their employer (hello $100/month plan!) and Medicare for the retired.
I mean my cousin in the US whose kid has cystic fibrosis get better care through Medicaid than our other cousin in Canada who can't even get access to the latest drugs.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/your-assets-magi-and-medicaid...
That $100/month plan will include high deductibles and copays. A weekend visit to an urgent care for a kidney stone will still cost a couple hundred dollars out of pocket.
The U.S. per capita spends far more on healthcare than any other OECD country. We don’t get correspondingly better outcomes or coverage. Universal healthcare is a solved problem within the context that every system necessarily involves some sort of rationing since there aren’t enough medical resources in any country to do otherwise.
If you don’t want to use the phrase “solved system” then don’t but don’t pretend the U.S. is any way better other than in anecdotal instances. Below is a source for information on per capita spending for OECD nations. You can easily find information on health our outcomes, life expectancy, teen pregnancies, infant mortality, etc.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/876d99c3-en/index.html?i...
I’m not sure how your reply has anything to do with what I said.
“Better than the US” is not some hurdle that makes a problem “solved”.
Canada is likely better at snow removal but that doesn’t make it a “solved problem”.
Doesn’t do much for the people disabled from pain on a 3 year wait list for a hip transplant or my buddy’s cousin’s kid who doesn’t get access to the standard of care of CF.
It’s not solved in the least, every country struggles, so using the word “solved” is, as I said, naive.
What goal do you wish to accomplish your pedantic nitpicking? You want to get others to believe that my views on national health policies are naive? You want me to realize that in a strict, mathematical sense of the word saying “solved” is incorrect? These are rhetorical questions because I’m not going to read your response. You clearly don’t know much about policy issues and what it means for a society have essentially “solved” an issue (or have found a decent enough solution that it isn’t a dire problem anymore so that some non pedantic people will say it is solved).
Carry forth Don Quixote on your quest to eradicate incorrect usage of what you think “solved” means.
You claim I don’t know policy without knowing healthcare policy is my day job.
Even given the benefit of the doubt that as an outsider looking in you think it’s solved, but as someone who is elbow deep in it everyday “solved” just sounds naive.
As for socialized medicine it makes doctors another arm of the government. In the UK last week (or the week before) one arm of the government ordered another arm of the government to kill a 9 year old. We are also just outside a 2 year stretch of tyranny of governments all over the world giving that arm of government near unilateral power over our freedom at the point of a gun.
Tell me you don't know what communism is without telling me you don't know what communism is.
Yes, every known communist country has been rife with fascism, authoritarianism, and corruption. But those are orthogonal with communism as an economic model. It's like saying socialism is evil because the Nazis were socialist (they really weren't) just because "Socialist" is part of "Nationalist Socialist Party" .
> In the UK last week (or the week before) one arm of the government ordered another arm of the government to kill a 9 year old.
[citation needed], because this sounds like an extremely gross misinterpretation of a situation, likely done deliberately in bad faith.