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Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

Would those procedures cost "six and seven figures" if it wasn't for health insurance? To put another way, would the costs be so high if it wasn't for the current health insurance system, where the "consumers" are actually the health insurance companies themselves and patients like you and I have basically no power to choose, well, anything.

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Huyterds, they don’t cost that much in Belgium though, US medical prices are out of the roof.

But how much does the Belgium gov pay to subsidize healthcare? (Just because the upfront cost is low to you, it doesn’t mean that’s the actual cost.) Is it still sustainable given the trend of retirees starting to outnumber working adults? Also how bad are the wait times to get socialized medical care?

It's cheaper for Americans to travel to Belgium, and then pay out of pocket for surgical procedures, than it is to get them done in America. And that's including the airfare and hotels too.

> how much does the Belgium gov pay to subsidize healthcare?

Belgium spends 11% of GDP on healthcare (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...)

The US spends 18% of its GDP on healthcare: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo....

> Also how bad are the wait times to get socialized medical care?

How bad are the wait times for not getting healthcare at all because your insurance doesn't cover it? Or because the associated costs will bankrupt you?

The prices have got to be up there. It’s taking up dozens of hours from multiple highly skilled workers at the very least. That with the use of very expensive medication and some very complicated machines adds up.

I don't know if it is insurance or the administration on both the provider and insurer sides. I have a horrible respiratory infection in western Europe, here I'd have likely died or been so overcharged I'd wish I had died. There 17 days in ICU on a ventilator and a few weeks or normal hospital recovery the total bill in 2001 was under $20K, the Euro and Dollar were almost even then so the conversion isn't important. Now if a local had needed that bed more I might have not been as lucky. This is what a well organized society can do, keep everyone under some level of free care so there is less chaos in their ER departments and that they'd have time to treat a foreigner well. If we switched to single payer the estimates are that we'd save money as a nation the first year, even with all the backlog of needed care and any transition costs. The savings would compound as preventive care started preventing more serious outcomes and things like car insurance and liability insurance would come down in cost too.

Yes. They're expensive in the US because our healthcare providers are expensive.

Middlemen can't raise the price that much; you could just go around them if so, either by not using it or by going to another country.

You haven’t been paying attention to what pE is doing. Every day medical services aren’t an international market.

You wouldn't be able to corner the market if it wasn't supply constrained (because it was already cornered by the AMA). The US doesn't accept medical degrees from other countries, has an absurd residential training program designed by a stimulant abuser, there are price floors called "certificates of need" where you can't open a hospital unless your competitors say you can, etc.

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