It's a huge source of risk and anxiety even if you have insurance. The extreme budgeting uncertainty and stress are hard to put in dollar terms, but they're expensive, on top of what's already the most expensive system around, and getting more expensive at something like double the inflation rate. It's inhumane and unsustainable. If it blew every other system out of the water it might, might be worth all that, but it doesn't, so it isn't, at all.
I agree though that the American system makes people feel insecure, but on the other hand, you guys can get treated for things like ADHD much more easily if you can afford it.
All I'm trying to say is that it's not sunshine and rainbows in every other OECD country. It might be in others, but not mine.
I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd prefer my health system to America's, any time.
A&E might be a pain the arse, sure, but an agonising life of medical debt - that I can't hope to pay-off any time in the near future - is a worse fate, I feel.
Price controls, public option, everyone must get insurance. Maybe outlaw for-profit health insurance. Those seem to be the basic, minimum common factors that make these suck less than ours, if you don't want to go single-payer or nationalized.
Free trade for me, not for thee.
We need to solve the actual problems, which is going to eliminate a lot of wasteful healthcare-related jobs, which makes it hard to do. But we still need to do that instead of proposing things that sound like they wouldn't do that but in practice would either do it anyway because it's not "Medicare for all" but "Medicare for all plus seven other things" and it's the seven other things doing all the work, or wouldn't do that and correspondingly wouldn't actually work.
Medicare for All virtually eliminates the private insurers, a significant part of waste in providing healtcare.
Their total profits are around 5% of premiums, which isn't even a dent in the problem even if you attribute no part of them to legitimate value such as taking the risk that actual claims will closely match actuarial expectations even when there may be unexpected events such as regulatory changes.
And their other costs are things that would either still be present with Medicare or provide legitimate value. One of the major costs is that they make consumers price insensitive, encouraging everyone to do unnecessary tests etc., which Medicare only makes worse. They also require doctors to do more paperwork, but the purpose of the paperwork is to reduce the incidence of those unnecessary tests and procedures and to defend against fraud. Medicare can eliminate those administrative costs by increasing the incidence of unnecessary test and undetected fraud, but that does not result in an overall reduction in costs.
