Having your job prospects threatened because you're unable to repay a hospital bill is the most broken, fucked up thing I've ever heard.
EDIT: Well, not the MOST broken and fucked up... but pretty fucking broken and pretty fucking fucked up.
EDIT: Well, not the MOST broken and fucked up... but pretty fucking broken and pretty fucking fucked up.
Summary: Born in a concentration camp as punishment for family members defecting ("three generations punishment"). Turns in his mother and brother for trying to escape. Witnesses their execution. At age 23, inspired by the idea of being able to eat chicken and pork, he escapes. Manages to reach China with no prior knowledge of the outside world.
As an American, what's fucked up to me is that in some other countries, you can actually be imprisoned for debt.
Job prospects can be threatened by many things that seem, at first glance, like they might not be related... and that may not be a bad thing in all cases. Let markets make their own decisions.
Medical care is not free, however in every country that has socialised healthcare (i.e. every developed country except the us) it is free at the point of use.
And if you're going to complain that it's more expensive because everyone's paying out of taxes, in 2012 the US actually spent more in taxes per person than e.g. the UK on healthcare[1]
Healthcare in the US is fucked up, and free markets are not the solution to every problem.
[1] http://wdi.worldbank.org/table/2.15Whether an actual free market would be better or worse than any of the current systems remains to be seen. But I'd rather have someone else try it :)
But centrally planned European health care systems are far from perfect.
I am familiar with the Swedish system and it is unable to diagnose problems because of administration. Afaik, international benchmarking comparisons supports this. The doctors at the "sharp end" don't have enough minutes per patient to find problems that aren't obvious.
People have to try to go to multiple doctors, until they find someone that isn't just too traumatized by the system to do their job.
I would guess somewhere between 0.5 and 5 percent (this has not been examined) of the Swedish population walks around with some simple to cure problem which lowers their life quality for years and decades. From myself and people I know -- knees, food allergies, lack of some vitamin/mineral, bacterial infections, thyroid problems, etc.
I have quite often heard the expression about someone with problems -- "too sick to get well". That is, that person is too ill to make enough noise that the medics have to take the energy and diagnose, just to get rid of him/her.
It's also "free at the point of use" in a free-market system. I just present my medical aid membership card and I get whatever I need; hospital, pharmacy, ambulance, etc. Yes, that is a present-day thing, not some fairytale future.
Not only that, but these "free-market" companies give out stuff for free because it is profitable to keep their members healthy. Gasp, benefits for free. They sometimes send out free traffic "officers" to congested intersections / accidents to help traffic along to prevent accidents, for non-paying individuals. Just a small taste of what a free-market system could do if left to its own devices.
I find it seriously scary how many People on the internet are totally brainwashed into thinking the free market is some sort of personified evil boogey-man and socialism is the panacea for all the world's ills. Both have their flaws, and both have benefits. How about you let people choose what they prefer?
What this works out to in reality, divested of all the religious narrative, is that free markets are better than what were called "royal patents". This goes directly back to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and SFAIK, nobody's really improved on it.
"Wealth of Nations" was an expansion on economics from his "Theory of Moral Sentiments".
I would submit that a reasonable comparison between the U.K. and the U.S. is vanishingly close to impossible. Especially with the NHS; that was formed after the War when the country was in pretty poor shape. People had trouble getting 1500 calories a day. In the US around the same time, we ensconced employer based insurance. That was fine so long as large, monolithic corporations ruled.
The people you are probably decrying the most are those who hold that the Efficient Markets Hypothesis ( see, it's not even a theory yet ) always holds no matter what. We dunno. Modulo the EMH, free markets generally perform better. The only debate is whether or not health care is a public good. SFAIK, that is unsettled, too.