I'm not a socialist and am broadly pro-capitalism, but for decades I've held a firm belief that healthcare should have a public option and people should have the ability to get high-quality medical care for $0, no matter how realistic that would be.
In European history, a lot of welfare reforms subsequently came down to Christian democrats (typically centre right to right by European standards) or cooperation between them and socialists and social democrats.
This just makes the US situation weirder - by the time socialists and trade unions gained much real power in Europe, universal healthcare was mostly already uncontroversial and settled or close to it as a result of the support of Christian groups on the right, with a couple of exceptions such as the UK, where the right wing rhetoric leading up to the NHS got pretty extreme.
I do agree with you that a lot of his motivation was to counter the socialists and unions though.
Though I'll note that already before Bismarck, the socialists largely didn't oppose state involvement - Marx famously lambasted the Gotha program of what became the SPD in part for their willingness to trust the state.
What bills? He’s 79 so he’d have been on Medicare for the past 14 years. Sure there’s the Medicare premiums, but that’s peanuts.
I don’t think he has any such bills. From the article:
> He has said he intends to use the proceeds to help manage medical expenses for possible health crises, and to fund programs for people with disabilities.
He doesn’t need the money to pay for some treatments for himself. He wants the money to give it away to others.
He pays like 140 a month extra for it though. But he had all his cancer treatments covered
That’s a lot of money for most retirees.
It's about 25% of the median annual full-time salary (but only ~70-75% of those employed in any given year are employed full-time for the whole year.)
More to the point, since salary doesn't tell you what people have lying around for emergencies, its more than double the median household total savings.
Even more to the point, population medians or avergaes for things like salary are not really applicable to subsets of the population like “retirees”.
Around a third of Americans have less than $1000.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/savings/average-ameri...
Access to advanced medical care can either by gated by one person's wealth or by the average wealth of many people.
At the end of the day though, someone is paying and the only way to actually cost reduce is too have worse treatment.
So tell me, why is random blood work billed for over 400$? Just to analyze the sample?
Part of the problem is definitely inflated pricing and no real transparency.
Unless you need that rockstar surgeon for that super specialty treatment that only the US can offer, the US healthcare system is just overpriced, broken and a money grab
Medicare+Medicaid in the US costs about the same person taxpayer as NHS costs per UK taxpayer. The NHS could be better, but we get universal care for a similar price than what leaves most Americans still needing private care to have any cover at all.
That strongly suggests that the US could at a minimum do far better at providing cost effective care - both public and private.
This is absolutely incorrect in the American system. Insurance companies introduce massive amounts of overhead for little benefit. Every study comparing them to Medicare finds that Medicare is way more efficient.
Most medical care does not need to be advanced. It needs to be effective, but it doesn’t need to be expensive. It needs to be expensive to generate a hefty profit, though, especially when you have a serious condition - you then become a forced buyer and the market does what the market does with forced buyers without special regulations.
If you cut out profit motive, you can _definitely_ make it cheaper. Your statement is incorrect.
but also the cost of treatments generally decreases with time, while the efficacy increases as techniques are refined, disseminated, etc.
advocate for whatever but use honest terms. you're advocating for a single payer system and there's no evading that.
Not everybody realizes that and they often fall for the single room in the hospital.
Shorter waiting times is definitely a thing though, especially for non life threatening conditions.
In Italy doctors also have public and private roles but can practice privately in public hospitals, which is weird but was an attempt to avoid losing them to private clinics, for the same reason. You also have private clinics administering public healthcare with a minor markup paid by the patient, and the base rate paid by the state, which isn't a thing in Hungary for example.
It is in general for non-life threatening conditions that there's such competition tho, I agree.
Most universal healthcare systems coexist with private options paid separately. Some are provided by private healthcare providers, and then too tend to coexist with privately paid services.
There's probably a decent point nearby about subsidized (or tarriffed) work messing with the benefits of free market pressure but it isn't this silly overstatement.
Every wealthy country besides Canada that provides public care is a counterpoint to this.
Because that's the public option in retirement and you can have private options like 401k on top