(Not) Luckily the US healthcare system is already collapsing without social medicine, so it’s not a great talking point. Staffing and supply shortages paint a bleak picture over the next few years.
I'm questioning this because with the exception of malpractice, the U.S. healthcare system seems to be working quite well, despite the large numbers of uninsured and those who cannot pay.
I just don't buy this argument that the U.S. healthcare system is "collapsing" because if you call an ambulance they will take you to the hospital, and if your life is in danger regardless of your ability to pay, there's a higher chance of surviving in an American medical facility than most places on earth.
I was having chest pains last week and got triaged within minutes at the ER. I’m pretty sure I “owe” them $500 for a previous ER visit which nobody mentioned during my stay.
My 65 year old uncle hasn’t had insurance in 20 years but when he got cancer three ago the social worker helped him sign up for disability and they got him on Medicare so fast your head would spin. He started chemo basically immediately and while his cancer is terminal the treatment has kept him alive for a long time, even longer than the doctors predicted.
My wife got billed $200,000+ for a visit in the hospital when she had a critical illness and almost died. She ended up paying $2000. This was more than ten years ago and it didn’t ruin her credit and nobody ever came after her for it.
And One more. The hospital messed up the billing for our first daughter’s birth and called us two years later saying we didn’t have insurance (we did). My wife said that was their problem. We never heard from them again or got a bill. I guess they just ate the cost? No idea. But it was over seven years ago and there were zero consequences and we never paid a dime.
> calling it socialized medicine seems misleading.
Outside of the UK, that is how health care in developed countries is organized. It's either that or some version of Obamacare (regulated, private, with price caps and subsidies) or a combination.
American conservatives call them all, without exception, "socialized medicine".
The US basically has socialized medicine that scares naive/“honest”/conscientious middle class people into paying up to subsidize it. I suspect if we passed legislation tomorrow to make the US a single payer system it’d all fall apart. But I suppose we’ve managed to trick the US taxpayers into socializing medicine while letting them pretend we haven’t.
We did, through our taxes and insurance premiums and opportunity costs. We paid for average care plus the greatest medical rentier system in the galaxy.
Let's be honest, overbilling and non-accountability is a huge disaster here. While people like you slip through the cracks in terms of not needing to pay, others slip through the cracks in terms of not getting care at all.
https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2021-11-17-cdc-reports-uni...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db317.htm
Health plans are required to meet network adequacy requirements.
https://www.kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/network-adequa...
Is an insurance plan an insurance plan if you can't pay the deductible?
I've done the math most years and I have yet to find more than a narrow window where you're better off with the low deductible plan than with a high deductible plan and putting aside the savings. Typically there's no window at all, the high deductible plan is always superior. (Note that this generally changes in situations where you pay a *percentage* of your premium, such as subsidized ACA plans.)
If we want to move away from high deductible plans the only way is for Congress to impose it, market forces will always drive it as high as it can legally go.
One way I experience, relevant to OP, is that even with "good" health insurance, I can't manage to get an appointment with most specialists faster than 3 months, and I can't even see my primary care physician faster than 3 weeks (at best) -- in case of something "urgent", maybe in 2 or 3 days.
This may be especially bad in the region I live in, I'm not sure. When I ask around, many of my friends in other regions have similar experiences. It is not in fact true that those in the US can generally see physicians without long waits for appointments, currently.