251–260 of 312 posts
In these discussions I think people often overlook one significant factor in delivering services to people in the US; population density. The EU and also France, have a higher population density than the US. The US is 33 per km, whereas France is 100, based on Wikipedia. This translates to higher costs because maintaining hospitals in low density areas raises the cost of care per capita. This is also a reason that in…
To a conservative opponent, getting high quality care at a low out-of-pocket cost is a result of health care being a redistributive social good, and "social good" is just code word for "shirking individual responsibility". They look at this situation and this author like they do their proverbial welfare queen...a beneficiary of their taxes.
If we actually want to convince them, we have to prove to them that Single Payer is an objectively more efficient system than insurance. In other words, were the total incurred costs lower than they would be in a our system? Because for them, that's an argument that matters.
Unfortunately even I, a strong proponent of single payer, would find a cross country comparison here to be disingenuous. Because it doesn't matter how efficient the French are at administering health care. What matters is how efficiently we would be at administering it. And hands down, we suck at government administration. Whether it is infrastructure, military, health, or whatever...everything we do costs more and takes longer than other governments doing the same thing.
And this is the major reason why our politics suck IMO. We have one side of the table that is 100% more government because government is awesome, one side that is 100% less government because government sucks, and nobody is arguing that we should be making government more efficient. And so we never get nice things.
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It's not just that the costs of getting healthy are taken care of. Here in austria free, yearly "health checkups" are offered to you by every doctor. Meaning, when you go there because of a cold, he will tell you that you ought to do a checkup every year, which include blood tests, psychological screening for alcoholism and other individualized tests like prostate cancer for men. It's just convenient to use the syste…
It's just convenient to use the system. I even had multiple MRIs and dozens of XRays after minor sport injuries just to be sure. I'm not sure where to draw the line, though. How do you determine when "just in case" costs too much? Remember, all Austrians paid for your mris and X-rays. I don't doubt it was worth it this specific case, but aren't the incentives wrong?
Older doctors might still give you referals to specialists or radiographers upon request, and check every tickbox on a blood test sheet, but younger doctors are tought that every additional test puts strain on the solvency and labor capacity of the health care system, and will not have irrelevant or unnecessary tests performed.
In Belgium, MRI and CAT scan capacity is limited, and you can't have an MRI on a whim - you need to be referred by a general practitioner to get one.
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The British student loan system is essentially a graduate tax in disguise. You only repay 9% of your income over £21,000, deducted automatically from your wages in the same way as income tax. The loan is cancelled after 30 years, regardless of how much you have repaid. Young people understand that it's not a "debt" in the conventional sense of the word.
And yet if they'd proposed putting a 9% rate of income tax above £21000 there would have been riots in the Tory party. It's a tax on people born after 1980 who want to have professional jobs, not all graduates . Ironically, this hugely favours immigrants from EU countries with free or cheap education systems. And I do think some people are put off by the debt-ness of it, but that's very tricky to measure.
You do know that there's (currently) literally nothing stopping you from getting your degree in those EU countries, right?
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> free education ( university included ) La Fac is one of the worst places to get an education though.
Shame this is being downvoted. Non-UK EU countries have some pretty shitty universities given how rich they are. Of the top 40 in the Shanghai Rankings, two are non-UK EU and five are in the UK. Cost-to-user in the UK isn't free but it's pretty cheap when compared to the American competition.
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US has 75% higher infant mortality than France which has a real impact on life expectancy.
The US healthcare system has lots of problems, but the quality of its infant care isn't really one of them. Infant mortality rates are calculated very differently in different countries which accounts for much of the US's "poor" rating. The biggest factor is that the US considers all births, regardless of how premature they are, towards its mortality rate and is aggressive in its treatment of pre-term births. Many ot…
From http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT?view=map
* 0.014% of dying during a pregnancy in the US
* 0.008% of dying during a pregnancy in France
Does France really have that low tax rate? Usually it's not only income tax people are paying over here and once Americans laern the total % of your money regular Joe pays for the government they are in shock, since they are not used to having so little money being left on the table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...
In the US, that's 26.9%. In France it's much higher, at 47.9%.
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How high are the fees ? In France, even in public Universities you still have to pay something, granted it's borderline free, from the top of my head, 400€ per year. I once chatted with a US girl thinking about going to college, IIRC one year there was almost the price a full fledged private school 5 year cursus. We both went silent for a minute.
It's almost £10000/year for EU citizens. Much higher for everyone else
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Thats an interesting point, but it would be interesting to see it compared by regions. Southern Europe generally eats a lot healthier than Northern Europe.
I am not sure that this is true. Many countries in northern Europe such as Iceland, Sweden, and Norway eat quite healthy. Using body mass index as a (arguably quite bad) proxy for a healthy diet we find [0] that many of the southern countries such as Spain, Greece and Portugal are more overweight than many countries farther north. [0] http://apps.who.int/bmi/index.jsp
The French health system has its own problems. There is little evaluation of physicians so picking a hospital is very much a lottery, unless you know insiders who will tell you where to go and not to go. The system runs a massive financial deficit. It is run in an administrative way which creates odds behaviors. For instance department allowances based on % of occupation of hospital beds, which lead them to keep peop…
You know what also runs a deficit? Your gym membership. Going to the movies. Eating at restaurants. Sometimes things cost money. I imagine that keeping the country healthy is a plus. Not to say that making improvements isn't a bad idea, but a cost-centric view on things almost always ends in bad decision-making. Decisions based on revenue generation, instead of the "real" objective (keeping people healthy).