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Comment by larrywright | Hacker News Reader

"I'll take socialized medicine any day of the week. the private sector does a terrible job of healthcare."

Go find the nearest veteran and ask them about their experience with government-provided healthcare.

EDIT: I don't mean to say that this is true everywhere, but in the US it definitely seems to be the case.

I moved to Denmark about 1 1/2 years ago, and my experience has greatly improved over my American experience. Strangely, given the fears that government=bureaucracy, one of the #1 improvements has been that bureaucracy is much reduced. In the United States, even though I was covered under a group healthcare plan, it was much worse. Rules on in/out-of-network doctors were byzantine, rules on referrals were opaque, and billing was a goddamn mess: one hospital visit means dozens of separate bills from every specialist, which are often miscoded and require time on the phone to sort out (turns out anaesthesiologists don't know shit about medical billing).

In Denmark, it Just Works™: I got a health card on my 4th day after being in the country, and it covers everything. No anesthesiologist sending me a surprise $5,000 bill for something that should've been covered; no arguing over preexisting conditions; just professionals actually trying to do their jobs correctly, instead of trying to figure out how to screw me over or pass the buck to someone else.

Uh, okay. My dad has been delighted with his VHA healthcare, if you demand anecdotal evidence. Statistically speaking, the Veterans' Health Administration routinely outscores private hospitals for satisfaction and is more cost-effective as well.

http://www.biomoda.com/presidents-column/june-presidents-col...

Certainly, the Department of Veterans Affairs itself is poor, and the facilities are dealing with a massive influx of new veterans, but the quality of healthcare in the VHA remains quite good.

My dad had the exact opposite experience. They were excruciatingly slow, quite literally almost causing him to die as a result of their bureaucracy. Private healthcare (Mayo, specifically) saved his life. Throughout my dad's final years I saw both kinds of healthcare at work, and there was a massive difference.

That's a good insight, thanks. The bureaucracy of providing care, especially where it involves the VA (which as mentioned is a different story than the VHA itself), can indeed screw up all the other benefits in the system. Definitely a cautionary tale to keep in mind.

By the way, as long as we're all here, this article by a fellow I used to work for is a remarkably insightful view of the problems involved with our current healthcare system:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...

The US has basically the worst cost of healthcare to life expectancy rate out of all the first world countries. They're going to have to improve either of those statistics to even contend with socialized medicine.

The US is way-off-the-chart bad actually:

http://andrewgelman.com/2009/12/healthcare_spen/

Great link. It's interesting how $ spent seems not to correlate with life expectancy - as noted by the person who wrote the article.

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