For a lot of elective procedures, the price is even low enough that it'd pay you to fly to the UK and stay in a hotel to get things done here if the recovery isn't too long.
For a lot of elective procedures, the price is even low enough that it'd pay you to fly to the UK and stay in a hotel to get things done here if the recovery isn't too long.
I guess what I wanted to say is, lucky you. Hold onto that NHS for dear life and resist any attempt to privatize it. It’s very much a one way street.
Whereas e.g. single payer was an unachievable pipe dream from where they were standing in 2008/09. And he'd rather have something a bit better rather than go for the excellent system and fail and be left with the bad system.
Democracy doesn't mean that the minority gets to overrule the majority when they feel like it. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
The excerpt from his book: https://archive.is/V5TVM . He also talks about "political capital" and whether it'd be more wise to spend them on e.g. recession recovery. Ctrl-F for "More than forty-three million Americans were now uninsured" to skip the introduction about how the system got to the way it got.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_Senate_spec...
My parents in America have Medicare plus a private “advantage” add-on they can barely afford. Right now they are waiting — for months — to find out if a necessary surgery will get approved or not.
I live in Thailand now, where I can afford insurance and get top quality care with no waiting, referrals, or uncertainty, and costs at the best hospitals still a fraction of US prices.
But please don’t do this. Our system is better than the US but private is now starting to struggle along with the NHS wait times as more people use their private coverage where they wouldn’t have done before.
There are much better countries for medical tourism: Thailand, Malaysia, Greece...
But the UK does attract a significant amount of medical tourism, and has hospitals specifically targeting an international clientele who clearly considers it a good balance of cost and quality.
I'd much rather make 3x as much in the US and still get free healthcare through my employer, with shorter waiting lists and better treatment outcomes than the NHS.
And we also have "skip the line" services here as well.
My family have worked as doctors both in the UK (NHS and private), and the US, and they vastly prefer the US system from an outcomes and efficiency perspective.
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Commonwealth Fund studies like the one in the article tend to be quite biased and pushing a very specific agenda.
But in reality, we have far better mortality rates (1) for serious diseases: 48% better outcomes for cancer, as an example.
When people with serious problems want treatment, they come to our system if they can afford it, because we actually do have better outcomes regardless of what these highly biased studies say.
1: https://www.politico.eu/article/cancer-europe-america-compar...
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Edit: People calling my argument a "strawman" should really try living in both systems for a year with a chronic, serious health condition.
They will very quickly find that the US system is far better than the NHS. We get seen more quickly, our doctors can afford to actually spend time on us, more effort goes into root-causing a problem, we have more treatment options, etc.
It's easy to theorycraft online and look at the "on paper" metrics from highly biased studies and come to the wrong conclusions.
Is this topic for discussing health care systems or the SW engineering salary dick measuring Olympics? Because those are two different unrelated topics.
Which country pays its software engineers the most is not some yardstick for measuring national quality of life of its average citizens, and whether SW engineers get paid a lot is totally irelevant to the people who are not working or aspiring to be SW engineers.
I bet the disabled US vets, homeless people or McDonalds workers in the states also don't give a fuck that their SW engineers are the best paid in the world but would probably feel a bit cheated learning that despite living and paying taxes in the richest country in the world, their peers in poorer EU countries get much more benefits and better quality of life.
Those two groups share interesecting means by which their healthcare is provided. Surprise! Its the government. So when people have doubts about an implementation of "Universal Healthcare" you shouldn't be surprised when you can acknowledge that as you said " but would probably feel a bit cheated learning that despite living and paying taxes in the richest country in the world, their peers in poorer EU countries get much more benefits and better quality of life."
Irrelevent but homeless people don't really pay taxes in any meaningful sense.
How strange. When I moved from US to UK within a FAANG I took a fractional pay drop and got an RSU topper. After leaving and working as a UK employee in an international org I make more than a lot of US directors. Perhaps the difference comes from the value you brought to the company?
One thing that is objectively true though is that, outside of the whinging from software devs in the 1% that no one really cares about, the outcomes and efficiency of the US system sucks compared to every other western nation.
We pay marginally more in tax, sure. How that is relevant to healthcare, however, is a mystery, given we spend less tax money per capita on healthcare than the US does. It's not healthcare that is the reason our taxes are higher, but other services.
I'm sure doctors prefer the US system. That's unsurprising - the US system pays doctors vastly large amounts. It also costs patients vastly larger amounts. So speaking of bias...
Nothing stops you from choosing extra insurance in the UK too if you believe you need that level of cover.
The only reason you're comparing it to the NHS instead of an equivalently expensive UK private healthcare plan is that the NHS provides good enough universal coverage that most people don't feel the need for more.
But the US equivalent would be to compare it with Medicare and Medicaid.
The US is far cheaper, even according to OECD metrics (disposable income after all expenses incl. healthcare.)