Hacker News Reader

Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

> "it is also imporant for us as a people to let go when nothing can be done, not to make things worse out of a need to be seen doing something"

In the case of cancer, universal care unfortunately seems like running in the opposite direction. Sometimes admitting that nothing can be done is the right thing.

Look at the case description - I wouldn't be surprised if the total bill was at least between 100k and 200k - for 20 days of useless care which ultimately resulted in the patient death.

There are some good economical analysis showing yearly cost that'll make you cry, especially if you consider the alternative uses of that money and how many lives could be saved - say in other countries.

With our current technology, universal healthcare for fighting cancer seems like trying to stop a fire with gasoline.

View on HN

Universal care is not running in the opposite direction.

I live in a country with universal healthcare.

I have several relatives who were diagnosed with terminal cancer. In this case, the hospital simply told them, the cancer is terminal and they've been given doses of morphine until they passed away. In USA, hospitals are facing conflict of interest. On one hand, they shouldn't be providing unnecessary expensive care but then they wouldn't be making as much money. No hospital should be ever put in this position.

Honestly, I'm shocked at how many people in US are against universal health care.

I'd be nice if in addition to offering morphine they would also offer a basic cryonics plan...

Heh... "basic" like "head only", or "6 months only"?

I'm not sure what you find funny about "we'll suspend you, but only for six months." "Basic plan" typically means "cheapest plan with a certain minimum quality of care", which is the only kind of plan that has a chance at full or partial subsidization; whether that's head-only or not depends on what the market costs for the procedure would look like if people started taking death seriously.

How does this:

> I have several relatives who were diagnosed with terminal cancer. In this case, > the hospital simply told them, the cancer is terminal and they've been given > doses of morphine until they passed away.

Go with this?

> Honestly, I'm shocked at how many people in US are against universal health care.

You can ask for palliative care from US doctors any time you like. You tell them you don't want to be treated and they'll send you home to die. Morphine prescriptions at that point aren't tough to obtain.

The shocking thing to me is that anyone would want universal health care that leaves them with palliative care as their only option.

If I'm diagnosed with cancer that may be terminal, I might choose to go out in a blaze of money desperately looking for a cure... or I might choose to give up and die quietly. It should be my choice, though.

When you look beyond the political demagoguery for obvious power grab reasons, you see that the US healthcare system produces just about the best results in the world:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-amer...

I'm shocked at how quickly people would give away their Freedoms for the illusion of being cared for.

If you are lucky to be rich, nothing is stopping you getting better health care and trying to add 1 or 2 years of life at extraordinary cost.

It just won't be covered by your insurance. To me, universal healthcare is a tradeoff. Everybody will get at least some care and nobody will go bankrupt because of medical bills.

Rich people will be still able to get whatever care money can buy. I don't understand how this is a question of freedom. Nobody is giving up freedom.

> If you are lucky to be rich

What if you work hard to be rich, and then you choose to use your money to pay for expensive treatments for you or your children? What if spending a bunch more money buys you a great deal more than a couple of years? What if the discoveries made at your great expense helps others who aren't so rich?

> Nobody is giving up freedom.

That's the justification of every little bit of thrown-away freedom we've made over the last hundred years in America. Ah, the smell of boiling frogs!

By being forced to put taxes into a least-common denominator system out of your control, you can't help but to give up freedom.

> then you choose to use your money to pay for expensive treatments for you or your children?

That's fine in any country with universal healthcare.

> What if spending a bunch more money buys you a great deal more than a couple of years?

It's possible, of course, but generally you'll have the best health outcomes with decent (cheap!) preventative health measures. The current insurance-based care system in the US doesn't gain anything from preventative care. Universal healthcare systems have a strong incentive to take this cheap route to a healthy population, fortunately.

> What if the discoveries made at your great expense helps others who aren't so rich?

Um; you can be proud of that, then? Of course, you can be a rich person who pays for treatments to be developed which you can then deny to poor people; that's called "the pharma industry".

> Ah, the smell of boiling frogs!

That's a myth; look it up. The frogs jump out when it gets uncomfortable. The same thing applies to most slippery slope arguments -- you have to prove each step would force the next. Most systems actually have forces pushing as well in the opposite direction.

Personally, I see how getting reasonable universal healthcare working in the US will be a difficult course, but I'm also convinced we have to fight our way through the problems (mainly: the corporations currently earning enormous profits from the current system...) and get it working. I grew up in the US, sometimes without medical insurance; I've also spent much of my life with a sometimes-expensive "preexisting condition".

Obviously, it's not "fair" if I'm bankrupted simply because I had the bad luck to have this condition -- hey, not everything in life is fair -- but I'm pretty sure that on balance, I'd be a more profitable economic unit/taxpayer to the US if I simply didn't have to worry about that.

How many people don't launch startups because they can't risk it?

>> Ah, the smell of boiling frogs!

>That's a myth; look it up.

Uh, yeah, I know that it's not biologically true. It's a metaphor. It doesn't matter that it's not biologically true just like it wouldn't matter if I used the allegory of the Frog and the Scorpion or the Ant and the Grasshopper.

> How many people don't launch startups because they can't risk it?

How many people don't launch startups because they don't have the disposable income needed to take risks?

You could compare US startup rates per capita with other countries featuring Universal Healthcare systems. Wanna guess what that graph would look like?

> Uh, yeah, I know that it's not biologically true.

You're skipping over my actual point; "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy by itself.

>How many people don't launch startups because they don't have the disposable income needed to take risks?

That's my point. You need to have much more disposable income if you're going to pay for medical insurance while you're hacking away in a garage. If you're keen on cutting down your life expenses, you can get then down really very low, even for a family... but expensive medical insurance doesn't play along.

> Wanna guess what that graph would look like?

Hard to say -- how would you make it apples to apples? Obviously "has universal healthcare" isn't the most significant variable in a straight comparison.

> "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy by itself.

Not necessarily. I wasn't making a fallacious slippery slope argument of the form A leads to B leads to C : B, therefore C.

I was simply pointing out that we are CURRENTLY in a state of greatly reduced Liberty and we got here slowly, step by step. I wasn't positing an inevitable terminal stage which would indicate a slippery slope argument. The stage we're in regarding Liberty sucks plenty enough as it is.

> Hard to say -- how would you make it apples to apples? Obviously "has universal healthcare" isn't the most significant variable in a straight comparison.

Right you are. Since I'm not looking for a PhD in the area, I'll go with my impression that the US has a great deal more entrepreneurial opportunities than any other country on earth, especially when you put it against reasonably comparable countries with universal healthcare. Add to that impression my experience in starting up companies here in the US (in the Bay Area) where I had plenty of disposable income because I wasn't paying high taxes to go to large socialist programs for healthcare, housing, food, etc.

> universal healthcare for fighting cancer seems like trying to stop a fire with gasoline

Tell that to the unemployed dad whom, twenty minutes ago, I directed to take his son to the ENT. He has had a swollen left tonsil for 5 years (last time he saw his pediatrician). Now he presents with 1 day of left ear pain. There's a mass hanging off his ear drum. Cholesteatoma? Unlikely. Maybe bullous myringitis. But at this point this kid's whole left pharynx is suspect and 5 years of infection starts one thinking about scary things.

I don't get what is being discussed here. How is universal healthcare like fuel to a fire where cancer is concerned? I live in a country with universal care, so my perceptions will obviously differ to others, but I'm totally not getting what is being discussed.

The topic of universal health care is actively debated in the US. Some people have adopted a position that universal health care is less ideal than our current fee-for-service model. As they explore the merits of their position, they try adopting various arguments. He tried adopting the argument that universal healthcare leads to more access to care, which leads to more interventions between diagnosis and death for people with cancer. However, and perhaps our responses help persuade him of this, that argument ignores the vast middle ground of people who survive several years or even are effectively cured for life. It also, as my prior comment pointed out, ignores the value of routine screening, especially at the extremes of age.

A big part of the problem in the original article is that of TOO MUCH CARE being provided regardless of cost without much consideration for whether the care is worth providing. One plausible concern about adopting "universal care" in the US is that it will make a bad situation worse, even further insulating patients from the cost of the care provided to them and thus making it more likely that we waste effort on extremely expensive procedures that don't do any good.

Now, certainly one might IMAGINE putting rules in place such that this didn't happen, but that doesn't mean such rules will get put in place or will actually work as intended given our generally messed-up political process.

  > Now, certainly one might IMAGINE putting rules in
  > place such that this didn't happen, but that doesn't
  > mean such rules will get put in place or will
  > actually work as intended given our generally
  > messed-up political process.

Isn't the assumption that universal health care will have no rules just as based in speculation as the idea that it will?

'Universal health care' is a pretty broad term. Most discussions that aren't about particular implementations are meaningless.

No, I'm sure it'll have rules intended to control costs and reduce unneeded care, but our regulatory history suggests the rules won't work as advertised. And that doesn't seem speculative at all - it's a dead certainty. Because the problem we have is NOT that individuals pay for health care, it's that health care is ludicrously expensive and ineffective and over-regulated and not subject to significant market competition on price or quality. Merely changing who writes the checks won't fix the other stuff which is the core of the problem.

In every other field, new technology makes production of goods cheaper. Even in medicine, if you look at the parts where people pay without insurance - LASIK, plastic surgery, dentistry, veterinary medicine - costs get cheaper over time. The parts of medicine that tend to get ever more expensive are the parts that involve third-party payment.

The book _Priceless_ has some decent suggestions for mechanisms that might help improve matters even given the existing (terrible) constraints we face.

> The parts of medicine that tend to get ever more expensive are the parts that involve third-party payment.

Medicine has a problem with third party payments that are invisible to consumers, coupled with insurance premiums invisibly negotiated by employers, coupled with ridiculous regulations that have created an enormous amount of dislocation of the economic incentives that would tend to drive prices down. In short, government got involved. What's our national solution? More government involvement.

See any similarities between health insurance, retirement planning (Social Security), "free" healthcare (Medicare & Medicaid), student loan programs and the cost of college education, or maybe in the home loans that caused the housing disaster?

Disaster after disaster is caused by applying heavy-handed Federal Government "solutions" to problems better solved by individuals, free markets, or at worst local and state governments.

So then do you agree with the following statement:

"Individuals who do not have health care or can not pay for it should be denied treatment".

That's what happens when you leave it up to free markets.

Since there's already Medicaid for the poor and no hospitals deny care now... your statement would appear to be incorrect.

I don't mind funding a worst-case-scenario safety net for the most vulnerable in the society. I don't mind some serious legislation aimed at fixing the real problems with healthcare in this country. The law passed by the Democrats in 2009 was a useless counterproductive disaster.

I work at an urgent care. We routinely turn away people who are uninsured or have Medi-Cal (California medicaid) AND are unwilling to an upfront fee for the evaluation. So we see the uninsured but only if they pay. I see no difference in the chief complaints, but the uninsured generally wait quite a bit longer, and therefore often need not 5 times as much care, but 100 times as much.

One term, one book.

Term: risk pool -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_pool

Book: The Social Transformation of American Medicine -- http://www.amazon.com/The-Social-Transformation-American-Med...

>Isn't the assumption that universal health care will have no rules just as based in speculation as the idea that it will?

The problem is what's acceptable in terms of denying care is very dependent on culture. In the UK people accept that the NHS doesn't pay for a heart transplant when the patient is 80 years old. In the US people expect every intervention to be provided (if the patient wishes) up to the moment that person dies. Universal care isn't going to change that attitude, at least not for a generation or two.

The most likely outcome of universal care in the US is a two-tiered system, where the national system pays for some subset of the things that can be done, and people buy private insurance to cover what they're used to getting now.

"a two-tiered system"

That's what the UK has - there is the NHS for everyone, free at the point of delivery, and there is a smaller private health care sector where you can get anything you can pay for.

In the USA, universal care is seen as a silver bullet by many who have never dealt with the reality of what it would bring. To a lot of people who support it, it's a vague undefined concept onto which they are projecting a lot of things out of their own imaginations, hopes, and fears.

Depending on the implementation, "universal health care" could make some things better than they are under the present system. Some things would be worse. People will still get sick. People will still die. People will still avoid seeking treatment until their condition is untreatable, because people avoid doctors and hospitals for a lot of reasons besides monetary cost.

To translate, and to make sure I'm clear:

It's likely that ignoring a swollen left tonsil for five years has allowed an otherwise treatable cancer to spread to the child's entire throat.

This would be addressed with universal health care by allowing that child to receive medical care before the case had escalated to that point.

correct

Agreed - but how frequent is that ?

And how will people understand that some cancers should be convered while others shouldn't? (especially if they have the "other" cancers)

Add to the mix a difference of incidence based on ethnicity and people will want universal converage of all cancers regardless how useful or useless treatment may be.

It's a pandora box.

> And how will people understand that some cancers should be convered while others shouldn't?

I don't understand the question. All cancers are covered. If a cancer is treatable then it is treated. If there's no hope than palliative care is provided. If it's in the quite wide margin then the patient and the doctor talk about current best practice, and decide based on what the patient wants.

If you're asking about how the people paying the bills decide what treatments can be funded and what treatments should not be funded, well, you develop a measure. That measure is something like "years of quality life" - Quality of Life Years is used in bit of English planning.

You have an independent body assessing evidence of effectiveness, vs cost. If something provides X QoLYs it gets permission for funding; if it doesn't the patient can fund it themselves.[1]

They then publish their documentation, and it gets reviewed every few years.

That's a transparent process, allowing people to review and challenge the choices made.

This can lead to some odd decisions. Treatment for some forms of age-related macular degeneration used to be limited to one eye, because being blinded is bad, but being blinded in one eye is not as bad. That decision was later changed.

Alongside that you tell people to stop smoking, and you offer them free smoking cessation services; you have strong H&S COSHH laws, and you enforce them; you educate about the dangers of too much sun[2]; etc etc.

[1] The UK had an unfortunate situation where drug companies were creating cancer treatment drugs that would provide maybe 30 days of extra life at a cost of tens of thousand of pounds. They then set up and funded patient advocacy groups who would call for the drugs to be funded on the NHS. Providing information to those groups was an effective way to bypass the strict laws against marketing to the public. The weird choice the government at the time made was to change a law so that if someone wanted to "top up" their treatment with one of these expensive but useless meds that person would have to fund all their treatment, not just the cost of those extra meds.

[2] Vitamin D is very important, and helps avoid some cancers. You only need a bit of bright sunshine (or better diet) to get it - sun bathing for hours everyday with no sun-screen is too much.

I can't comment of the UK system, I haven't had any experience with it (theoretical experience is not the same as the actual experience)

QALYs and DALYs have a potential - they are interesting tools to separate covered cancer from uncovered cancers, but I would fear political abuse and biased measurements - just like your [1] example.

The Australian system is a bit like this.

The PBS (an independent government organization, which is walled off from political lobbying) will subsidize drugs, but only ones which are worth it (as decided by expert panels). They act as a monopoly buyer, forcing monopoly sellers (the drug companies) to offer a more reasonable deal. If the drug is too expensive, the PBS won't subsidize it, and the drug company can lower the price (to get PBS subsidies) or face drastically lower sales.

This is less of a problem when he patient has been paying into the system his/her entire life, the premiums of which are not subject to profit margins or administrative inefficiencies (as much), and medical care costs less than half of what it does in the USA.

End of life care is surprisingly affordable when the above conditions are met.

> This is less of a problem when he patient has been paying into the system his/her entire life,

That argument ignores the opportunity cost of doing other things with the citizen's money, obfuscates the actual lifetime cost of healthcare, and is just an inherently Liberty-reducing due to a lack of opt-out.

> the premiums of which are not subject to profit margins or administrative inefficiencies

Which large long-term government programs can we refer to that are efficient? I'd be really surprised if you could name even one of significance.

Medicare has lower administrative costs than most health insurance providers.

... with significantly reduced treatment options for patients and an ever-dwindling number of doctors who will work with Medicare-insured patients.

It's fine for what it is, but I don't want it to be the only game in town. Given that the whole "If you like the insurance you have now, you can keep it." turned out to be a lie, healthcare reform in the US needs some rollback and rework.

Look at the case description - I wouldn't be surprised if the total bill was at least between 100k and 200k - for 20 days of useless care which ultimately resulted in the patient death.

This is exactly why universal health care is a good idea. For each person gaining little from expensive care, there are many who can be saved or get a better quality of life from cheap and relatively minor medical services they otherwise may not feel able or comfortable to pay for.

If you put all of those experiences into one huge melting pot and manage it properly, you get a positive net outcome, as demonstrated by numerous countries.

The fact that something might work in "numerous other countries" is of limited utility in determining whether it would work in the US.

Consider: If your kid is a bad student, pointing out that the neighbor's kids down the street are excellent students doesn't really help your kid pass math. Telling Microsoft or GM it should just "be more like Apple" doesn't mean they could succeed following Apple's strategies.

The US system has been very different from these other counties for quite a long time. We have different values, different skills, a different history, a different political process. It's quite possible that you simply can't get there from here. The transplant surgery necessary to put a european welfare system into an otherwise-American sociopolitical system could kill the patient. America is just NOT LIKE a tiny european country, and the ways IN WHICH they are different are relevant to what is politically and practically possible.

The US system already have 'universal health care'-ish systems. Medicaid and the VA health system. Both different models (government as insurer and government as hospital owner).

I think the country most similar to the US is probably Canada. Canada has both significantly cheaper medical care (US$4360/person/year vs. $7960/person/year) and significantly higher life expectancy (80.7 vs. 78.2) than the US.

Another candidate would be Australia. Life expectancy 81.81 years, medical cost $3445/person/year.

Or maybe the UK. Life expectancy 80.05 years, medical cost $3487/person/year.

I think we can get there from here. We've had Medicare for over 40 years. It's just a matter of slowly lowering the eligibility age until everyone is covered. Of course it's not politically easy -- the healthcare industry makes a ton of money and owns a lot of politicians -- but it's possible.

Those are good countries to compare US to for public policy. I go nuts when people draw in Scandanavian examples for diverse anglo nations.

But that doesn't mean that the alternative of universal health as it's practiced in those other countries is a good alternative, just the obvious one.

The current US system is stupid: tying your healthcare to employment. It's no surprise that creating distance from the people who pay and the people who consume significantly increases costs.

In Australia you can opt for private health insurance, and get a rebate. Nothing like that in the UK. People in London who can afford it often pay for private service to avoid dealing with the state facilities. I'd be interested to know whether that was factored into the books for the figures you cite - I'd expect not.

The big issue is aged care. If the official system is so awful that you find ways to keep your parents at home longer - how does that get reflected in the numbers. Also quality of life issues - whether people in state aged care in country A are having a good time at greater expense, whereas those in country B are being dosed up with drugs to keep them quiet. What choice does the person and relatives have in that care? With universality - very little.

I can't see how universal care could deliver good outcomes for aged care. It has all the makings of a numbers game, an exercise in muddying the waters about who is responsible so they can ship a cheap one-size-fits-all model.

This is what more specifically would happen in the US: providers of drugs, medical equipment, etc. would lobby for government mandates and other support, essentially sucking unlimited amounts of public funding to cronies. This is more or less how defense procurement works.

> useless care which ultimately resulted in the patient death.

Don't state it as if the hospital care caused the death, it was the cancer. This was a worst case scenario. In many cases that care could have bought the patient months or years to live, which most would agree is worth $100k to $200k when facing death.

I remember about an Australian medical economics study from approx 2 years ago which specifically removed "easy" to treat cancer (skin cancer + some leukemias) then tried to compute the average cost and average survival compared to abstention for all remaining cancers.

IIRC, it was about $1 million per person for at best 1 year saved on average.

Is $1 million when facing death still worth it, for less than 1 more year?

If it's your money and you've got plenty - or if it's someone else money, I am sure it is.

I'm sorry I can't find it back - only some midly interesting investigations on the subject like http://www.mnwelldir.org/docs/fraud/able.htm

If someone can find it back, I'd be really interested.

Are those AUD or USD dollars?

Here's one about women with ovarian cancer (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20973265)

Here's one about the cost effectiveness of skin cancer prevention (http://heapro.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/1/73.full)

Here's one about skin cancer prevention using sun screen for white populations in sunny locations (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22433757)

Here's one about the skin care costs of skin cancer caused by UV (http://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N2538.html)

Some of these look interesting, but obviously I haven't had a thorough read yet.

These are separate studies about specific cancers, and interesting.

But the biggest point in the study I remember reading was that it mixed up all the "not easy to treat [1]" cancers together, pondering each cost and survival time with the cancer incidence. It gave a better picture of the "less known" cancers - which is addressing the real question with universal healthcare.

I mean, if overall the expansive cancer or deadly cancers are rare they we can afford them - but they weren't, and overall outside specific case, even if one tried the best healthcare, it was not a very efficient outcome.

I'll love to find it back - that or a study sharing the methodology. IIRC it was in USD.

[1] : by easy to treat I mean cancer which is very unlikely to reoccur if properly treated, for which one or more therapies are known to be effective, with costs and morbidity well known - like skin cancer.

The Australian Dollar is roughly at parity with the US at the moment (Currently $1 AUD = $1.03 USD) and has been for sometime... so if the observations from the study still hold today, the amount would be about equal in either currency.

A lot of the discussion in this thread seems to be along the lines of “if universal care is instituted in the US, then it will be ruinously expensive, because doctors will authorize every kind of treatment and the taxpayers will pick up the bill” vs. “no, because when this is done in other countries, the agency that finances health care sets standards for what procedures and drugs they will cover under what circumstances”.

I would like to point out that whether or not universal health care is brought to the US (it’s scheduled to kick in under Obamacare, but if the Republicans win they can effectively kill it), the fee-for-service model of paying doctors will have to go away, because right now that model is one of the things running up the cost of private health insurance here. The insurance companies, faced with rising costs, can either impose more restrictive rules about what they will or will not cover, or they can hike their premiums.

In the former case, they’re doing the same thing that a government agency would do, except that people generally change insurers when they change jobs... meaning that any care that costs money up front but would prevent problems five or ten years down the line is not worth spending money on, because some other insurance company would be picking up the savings.

In the latter case, middle- and upper-class families see more of their paycheck going to insurance, while people who can’t afford the premiums but aren’t poor enough for Medicaid just go without insurance, depend on the emergency room if they really really need something, and risk getting bankrupted by medical bills if a serious condition does appear.

(Which is why Obamacare was passed in the first place.)

Just so we are clear: You're against universal health care?

In a best case scenario, with educated and understanding people, no political interference, even with our limited technology, it would be a good thing and I'd favor it - especially for diseases which are cheap and easy to treat if caught early.

In the real world we live it, it will be bringing our economies on their knees. It's a bad idea.

Generally, I am biased against bad ideas.

Real world data show the opposite of what you're saying. The US spends more on health care than other developed countries with universal healthcare. You must know that, so what point are you trying to make here?

I know that.

In the US, a market economy applied to healthcare limits the demand. Yet a lot of money gets spent uselessly in healthcare- and this happens even in government run programs.

People want more of everything, but there are physical limits about what is possible.

Even if each person get less per dollar than in other countries, for some reason I don't fully understand there is a high demand of healthcare, and also more distrust of an expert run system (like QALY evaluation in the UK)

It's not just an inelastic demand - it is more like a weird moral hazard scenario, or as if healthcare had increasing marginal returns for people utility function.

In this situation, replacing the market system by a government program might cost less in the short run - I fully agree - but much much more in the long run if demand is liberated.

That's because healthcare is not just like any usual good where you have reducing marginal returns, and it will be made worse especially after it has been "shown" that the endless money supply of the government can provide healthcare to anyone! ("shown" not as a valid proof, but as "noticed" by people who can cast a vote)

In the long run, I believe it will end up costing much more by this self perpetrating demand, up to the point it actually damages the economy.

A dollar spent on healthcare is not "productive" - healthcare is an investment with a negative interest rate. You can only put more money to try to keep your capital - but in the end you still die (maybe that's the reason for the increasing marginal returns - you need more and more of it).

It's bad enough when a country make debts not for investment but for consumption, yet it's much worse to make debts to "invest" in something like healthcare - with a negative interest rate

European countries are in for a bad day when they won't be able to patch the system anymore. In France IIRC the social deficit was around 100 billions in 2008 - much more than the government budget - with a 10 billions deficit just for healthcare. Now it's 160 billions in 2012 - http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20121001-707300.html]

Almost doubling in 5 years - let's round that to 60 billions per 4 years for a country of 60 millions persons.

Let's make some quick calculations.

Do you have any reason to think than, in a country with 5 times more people, and spending 16% of its GDP on healthcare instead of 9% in France (not sure about the precise %, but it's around 33% more), all others things being equal it won't create at least a 6051.33 ~ 400 billions deficit in 4 years?

(and that's a baseline scenario with an identical efficiency - with the highest cost of healthcare in the US, which can't be slashed in a day, I'd expect something at least like a 1000 trillion/5 years - and that won't be a stimulus, except for increasing demand)

I disagree strongly with pretty much all of your points.

You acknowledge that the vast majority of the evidence points towards universal healthcare systems being more economically efficient in your first sentence. You then proceed to make an argument that basically asserts the US is a special case and that a universal care system wouldn't "behave" as it does everywhere else and reduce costs, but instead increase them. I see no basis for this assumption and I want to challenge you to demonstrate why you should be granted it.

I also want to challenge you on your implied definition of "useful" or "efficient". You say you would favor a universal system if you were to see convincing evidence that it would reduce costs. In your argument, I at least, read an implicit assumption that cost ought to be the deciding factor. I find that point of view detestable. For corporations, whose sole purpose is profits, it makes sense to think of efficiency that way. You and I, however, are people, and shouldn't have values that put resource acquisition higher than human well-being. You're free to disagree, but doing so would convince me that we have very little common basis for dialog.

In the last part of your comment you give France as an example of a country that will suffer dire economic repercussions for having run an unsustainable universal healthcare system. I haven't double-checked your references, but I'm happy to grant you, for the sake of argument, that the data is on your side. You've chosen to ignore the vast majority of strong economies with universal healthcare. You've also failed to mention that whatever problems France may have in the future, they pale in comparison to the budgetary problems the US is facing due to the privatized healthcare system it is currently running. References forthcoming should you ask...

I'm sorry if I seem to be making a special case of the US - what I wanted to say is universal healthcare is not a good idea in general, and even more in the US which is like a worst case for trying to implement it.

Universal healthcare reduce individual costs, ie is "more efficient", but raise the demand. Even if it makes each act 50% less expansive, if the demand is 4x more, that'll still be 2x as much in total - it is less efficient on society as a whole, because it's not a productive use for money.

My point is not that resource acquisition is the highest goal of human beings, it is just that money spend of such thing can not be put to a better use. It's good to spend money on feeling good (healthcare), as long as the other way the money is spend provide growth.

I would favor universal system if I saw convincing evidence that people would not overclaim (ie seek treatment for minor ailments), and if they were respectful of the regulation system which has to exist if they can't self regulate with their own money. I see just the opposite, except maybe for the UK, but I don't have any experience with their system, and I don't know if they run a deficit. Anyway, if there is a special case, it certainly is the UK.

Even worse - I've noticed a troubling trend. Apparently "generosity" or "social spending" is correlated with group identification - i.e. people who self categorize as different groups (based on religion, ethnicity - anything) are less likely to favor social spending, maybe because it could favor the other group. I don't have evidence for this - it's just something I noticed when people are debating about social systems.

It is troubling, because most of the countries implementing universal healthcare are also running active immigration programs, which helps balance the cost of their social system. But if the trend is real, this countries will voluntary reduce their social spending after the initial period where immigrants footed the bill - leaving them resentful.

My hypothesis is that countries where diversity increases (such as countries in the western EU) will reduce their social systems, while countries where diversity plunge (don't know if there is any at the moment - but the province of Quebec in the 1970 is the closest example) will increase their social spending.

Please give some references for the US, but from quick calculations adding a trillion of deficit every 5 years looks like a bad idea (and I'm only talking about public healthcare in France- many people pay on top of that private insurance since the public system doesn't fully cover all the costs - money spent to purchase service from such for profit companies should certainly be added if you want to compare healthcare systems)

I would favor universal system if I saw convincing evidence that people would not overclaim (ie seek treatment for minor ailments)

What a strange position to take: "Don't use healthcare unless it's really serious". Good healthcare is about a high quality of life.

it is just that money spend of such thing can not be put to a better use.

Such as? There are few things better than "being healthy".

Such as increasing our level of technology so that the next generation will be better off, which is what every generation did until we got the idea that putting a bigger and bigger chuck of the GDP on healthcare each year was a bright idea. Over 10% it is not sustainable. It has to stop growing.

If it was used to develop life changing technologies for the whole human species such as whole brain emulation, space colonization etc- why not. At the moment is it just about making us more comfortable.

A temporary high quality of life indeed, at the expense of the future. Not a bright idea.

You aren't consistent in the point you are trying to make, which lends me to believe you believe in your side beyond reason. People have stated that universal health care has and does work in other countries.

Check out Australia's economy, and it's healthcare system. Admittedly it's scale is tiny in comparison to a U.S and there is a valid discussion of how universal health care scales (i.e is it linear, etc). But evidence already shows it works, so I don't see any point in further trying to convince you.

You might want to check out this though: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/

It seems that is what is happening here.

> you believe in your side beyond reason

I don't believe in anything. Maybe universal healthcare will be possible some day, and even a good thing. Presently, in the US, it's a really bad idea.

Australia is the token example of what I said above- the bill for its social system is footed by immigrants, to which some bright bulbs think removing coverage would be another bright idea.

The best solution to reduce costs? Remove all the legal cruft - including medical boards which create monopolies in labor. Leave maybe only the FDA to evaluate drugs. Let the market sort out the rest - ie deregulate.

Seriously? You feel confident enough to evaluate the qualifications of the 'doctor' you've just gone to see about the potentially life-threatening bulge on the side of your neck, which he dismisses as just "an enlarged lymph node, no way its Non-Hodgkins lymphoma", which if caught early enough is totally treatable but if you wait too long is fatal? You really feel qualified to do that?

Australia is the token example of what I said above- the bill for its social system is footed by immigrants, to which some bright bulbs think removing coverage would be another bright idea.

Um... what? I'm Australian and have a pretty good idea of the funding of our healthcare system. Can you please explain in better detail how it mooches off our immigration?

Also, can you please cite some references showing folks that want to remove coverage from immigrants being sensible economists rather than fringe racists?

It seems to me that you're just inventing things out of whole cloth at this point.

I'm not australian so I can't say for sure what's happening down there, but the situation seems very much like France.

In Europe, and especially in France, many people share the belief that immigration is causing problems to the healthcare system. Whether they are economists or fringe racists does not matter if they manage to get enough votes.

I don't know how frequent racism is in Australia when compared to France - after reading about the riots in the press, along with this recent article which featured a poll, showing 83% thought racism was prevalent I thought it was "very much alive". http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/racism-very-much-a...

Maybe the press and the polls are inventing things, and my comparison with France is not valid- but since we were talking about Australia, it seemed quite apropos.

EDIT: Volpe, please reread the parent comment. The problem is that western countries with diversity and immigration programs are also the ones with universal healthcare, and that there's a trend of resentment against other groups in these countries (quite related !!) that apparently conflict with the basic idea of social spending, and thus universal healthcare.

I've made my prediction - that countries with low (or no) growth will either reduce (or maintain low) their diversity and increase social spending, or increase diversity while decreasing social spending.

I'll be watching the situation in Europe and North America to see if these predictions happen - using universal healthcare as a proxy to see how social spending evolves.

Australia and Canada could give interesting example since they run active immigration programs and enjoy a decent growth - while still harbouring this kind of resentment. I'd be curious to know if growth can be helpful against this trend, or if the trend is stronger than the benefits of growth and will keep developing.

So I'll paraphrase what you just wrote:

France is having some problems that (i think) support my case, and I saw that Australia has some unrelated racism issue, so I concluded that France's healthcare system and Australia's healthcare system are the same.

Do you recall my earlier point about you being 'beyond reason' you are just making wild guesses at things, and cherry picking data to support your factually incorrect stance.

The article you posted highlights a peculiarity of the Australian racism debate - most of it is countering the idea that there is no racism in Australia, which is nonsense. There is racism here, just as there is racism everywhere. And it's got nothing to do with social spending - the US harbours quite a lot of racism (much more openly than in Aus) and it hates social spending. Australians are so sensitive about the race issue that most will either say there is no racism or that we're the worst in the world, but the truth is that we have problems, but aren't that bad if you actually start comparing to other countries. We certainly have nothing like France's actual laws on books that single out muslims.

But back to the meat of the question, you said this: Australia is the token example of what I said above- the bill for its social system is footed by immigrants. How are the immigrants footing the bill? From what you've said above, they're draining the system, not funding it ('causing problems')

Also, on the while still harbouring this kind of resentment bit - There is not a country in the world that doesn't have a racism problem nor a population segment that resents foreigners.

If you truly believe the market is the best way to sort it out, why not let the government compete? Have a single-payer system and let people opt-in. Also, repeal the laws that currently prohibit the government from negotiating drug prices. In a free market, if I'm a major client, I have some leverage to get preferential rates. Then, I'd be all for the market sorting it out. Would you support something like that? My guess is not, which means you aren't really arguing for deregulation, but for a different kind of regulation.

The government can not "compete" with the free market - because it foots the bill with tax money.

One or more non-profits OTOH? For sure I would agree - and if they can get leverage and get preferential rates, good for them.

> the bill for its social system is footed by immigrants

Umm... except they are covered as well... so how does that work?

I was trying to figure out what was bugging me about the line I quoted of yours and figured it out - you call a healthcare visit a 'claim' rather than a 'visit' or 'consult' or whatever. I worked in a hospital for four years and never heard of any malingerer referred to as an 'overclaimer'.

Skipping over the difficulties of implementing universal health care for the moment -- the thing I like best about it is that it drastically simplifies an entire category of "stuff I hate that keeps me up at night".

If "but what happens if I get sick" is no longer a large factor in questions like "should I start this business", people are freer to throw themselves into developing the kind of technology you're talking about.

I've literally spent months of my life dealing with the details of arranging and paying for healthcare for myself and my family -- including time worrying about "but if X happens, how will I pay for it?" It's one of the main stresses in my life, and it very obviously costs me in productivity.

Hm; hope this is coherent; I'm out of time. :(

You are quite coherent and this is IMHO the only case where healthcare could be considered an investment - so that it doesn't prevent people from starting a business.

Not sure it is enough by itself to support a universal healthcare ideal, but this a very valid reason - along with easy to treat diseases when they are caught early on.

Right, preventative care, and not just starting businesses -- it stops people from doing all kinds of good things.

Creating art or writing novels, going back to school, moving across the country, working for startups (not just starting them), having kids (or adopting, or taking a leave of absence to help raise kids)... there are lots more things that could go on that list.

Not all of those things equal "more money to the government". Some are "quality of life" sort of things; some add cultural value; etc.. But having a safety net for health issues fixes a lot of problems even for people who won't ever really need it (but can't know that for sure...), and is a sort of economic equalizing factor that I like more than taking more money from rich people and giving it to poor people.

NOTE: This is meant as a reply to guylhem's response below.

It is true that the percentage of GDP the US is spending and will be spending in the future is not sustainable, but you're making an argument for universal healthcare. The reason costs are skyrocketing is that you have a privatized system that's (oddly) subsidized by the government. Patent laws give pharmaceutical companies monopolies on different types of drugs, while on the other hand the government is forbidden to negotiate with those companies on the price.

You also have huge overhead (31%) due to the inherent inefficiencies of running this kind of system through the private sector. For example, you need at least two doctors for each transaction - one to diagnose you and prescribe treatment and one working for the insurance company making sure that you actually need that treatment.

As for the argument about demand reduction, I agree that if you had much more demand, even reduced costs may make it unsustainable. However, in the real world that is demonstrably not happening. It simply isn't the case that universal healthcare is more expensive if we consider the evidence.

[temporary monopolies exist to preserve innovation - but let's leave that issue aside]

It might be possible that the overhead will vanish if universal healthcare is implemented. It seems unlikely to me, but a good part of the argument for universal healthcare depends on that.

Yet people just don't vanish or "lie down and die". Those who are making a living from the overheads will certainly want to go on doing that. Universal healthcare will just give them leverage and moral support (think of the patient!) to do it on a scale that will dwarf the gravy train of other government procurement contracts - at the taxpayer expense.

It's IMHO a risk not worth taking.

>I would favor universal system if I saw convincing evidence that people would not overclaim (ie seek treatment for minor ailments)

The saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" comes from medicine. Many problems are much easier to treat earlier on; by discouraging people from seeking treatment you end up spending more and getting worse results - as happens in the US.

>Anyway, if there is a special case, it certainly is the UK.

Hardly; look at Canada or Australia or France or Germany or Italy or.... The US is a clear outlier among countries with a similar GDP per capita; it's the only one without socialized healthcare, spends far more per capita on healthcare and has a noticeably worse life expectancy. I don't think this is coincidence.

> spends far more per capita on healthcare and has a noticeably worse life expectancy

This is a demagogued political point that I've never seen backed up with evidence.

The US has a high death rate from murder, car deaths, and other factors... but from point of application we have the best healthcare in the world.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/11/23/the-myth-of-amer...

> the budgetary problems the US is facing due to the privatized healthcare system

Wait, the what?

Did you really just try to pin the blame of US budgetary stupidity on the PRIVATE healthcare system?

So, wars, enormous unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid (both public healthcare systems), and the general welfare state don't dominate the "budgetary problems the US is facing"?

A dollar spent on healthcare is not "productive". What do you base this statement on? Well run public healthcare programmmes are exceptionally cost effective. Cancer screening, childhood immunisations, dental, eye and hearing screening for children, free doctors visits for children. These are all things people around me use on a routine basis. They have a real and measurable effect on productivity for us all and do save money. All these healthcare programmes and many, many more, aren't run for the sake of smiles and happiness. They save dollars, lives and increase productivity.

I'd call that 'maintenance cost'. It is not an investment - in the sense of bringing more money in the future.

It's actually worse than that: US government spending on healthcare per-capita actually exceeds per-capita government spending on healthcare in countries like Canada or the United Kingdom that have universal healthcare [1], let alone total spending per-capita across both the private & government sectors.

Far from universal healthcare bringing an economy "to its knees", it seems to me that the US system has a far greater chance of doing so.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthca...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com