The cost is never zero. Doctors, nurses, don’t work for free. Infrastructure isn’t maintained without money. It comes from somewhere.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastically libertarian or deliberately antagonistic.
They were just expressing the notion that while the acute personal cost is zero the actual cost is still borne. They didn’t make the point in a very nuanced way but any system that divorces the cost from the person receiving the treatment hides information by suppressing the natural price discovery mechanism.
Anyway, I agree that insurance has a similar problem, at least if policies like “no pre-existing conditions” are followed. However if such policies are not in place then premiums would go up and thus the information propagation of the price mechanism is (all else equal) restored.
I don’t have time to get into it but speaking from the US perspective I really wish we had a real free market system with no government revelation or licensure laws whatsoever. What we have now is criticized by the ignorant as a “failure of unbridled capitalism” but it is of course anything but. It is absolutely absurd that I can’t decide that I don’t want insurance and equally that I’m not told what a procedure or drug or item will cost beforehand. I’ve been to the ER several times and you’re always treated like a bag of meat to poke and prod and I have to be very diligent about constantly getting them to tell me what they’re actually doing. (And don’t even get me started on the chargemaster system where they initially charge you 10x more than what they expect to recoup purely for leverage to negotiate with insurance)
Yes, that's the definition of insurance. Insurance company takes money from everyone (say, for car insurance) but only pays out to a few (those who crash their car).
As any insurance broker will happily tell you, the smaller the pool of people you belong to, the higher the premiums because they can't spread the risk as wide. Thus, a 100K+ employee company can buy health insurance for their employees at a better rate than a 4 person startup.
The optimal group size for an insurance pool is: everyone in the whole country. Maximum pool size, risk is spread as widely as possible, cost is minimized.
Someone is. "Total cost zero"
It's dishonest.
If you simplify and subtract the need for intermediaries to extract profit from this kind of system, remove all risk of anyone in the country being personally financially destroyed by their health care needs, remove from US businesses the obligation to manage and pay for their share of their employee health benefits, and distribute the resulting costs across the entire population, would you argue that would somehow cost more? That the resulting "higher taxes" would exceed the lowering of all the systemic, business, and personal costs and risk above?
If I wanted to buy the same plan I had from an employer, a family plan, it would cost over $30k in premiums, with an $8k deductible and a $17k out of pocket maximum each year with co-pays.
All of those costs and it is still routine for the insured in the US to find out that the care they received actually isn't covered by their insurance, as well, so they're on the hook for paying for some care completely out of pocket.
I would love to hear your explanation for how my savings is actually higher now while I'm being extorted each year with higher and higher premiums for less and less care.
We’re not arguing that funding is required, simply how it flows and to whom.
Disclosure: I too have first hand experience with Australia’s healthcare system. It’s very good.
I dont understand this argument. You literally dont have to pay anything after you come out of the hospital so yes the cost is zero.
You do pay overall for the cost in taxes but so do Americans yet their hospital costs is non zero.
