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Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

economist.com

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Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#311

Post by toasterlovin »

gambiting wrote: post #64
sykh wrote: post #6

When a person gets a life threatening disease they ought not worry about whether or not their treatment will leave their family in penury. This is especially so in a nation as wealthy as the U.S. The American healthcare system is immoral and I hope it drastically changes. Americans need to change their underlying notions of what it means to be a society. An author was once made fun of for suggesting that it takes a v…

There was a good comment(I have it saved somewhere) explaining this quite well - some places in the world(European nations mostly) got so fucked over by history, over and over and over again that as societies they realized you cannot "pull yourself by your bootstraps" and provide for yourself in all circumstances. Just in the 20th century it was possible to see your country ravaged by two world wars, change ideologie…

The US and Europe are not really great comparisons for a bunch of reasons, but the fundamental one is that Europe has been at Malthusian population limits for a long time, whereas North America has had an essentially unlimited, unpopulated frontier that new people could move to and create lives for themselves.

Thus, the American notion of pulling your self up by your bootstraps was a workable one. Since North America was first colonized by Europeans, Americans have moved west and made a future for themselves and their descendants by using hard work to harvest the bounty of nature. But Europe has been full for thousands of years. You can't just move West, work some land, and raise a family; there are already other people wherever you would want to go.

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#312

Post by ajross »

merpnderp wrote: post #10
sykh wrote: post #6

When a person gets a life threatening disease they ought not worry about whether or not their treatment will leave their family in penury. This is especially so in a nation as wealthy as the U.S. The American healthcare system is immoral and I hope it drastically changes. Americans need to change their underlying notions of what it means to be a society. An author was once made fun of for suggesting that it takes a v…

If you think the private healthcare system is immoral, you should take a look at the 100% government ran healthcare system that is the VA. You literally couldn't make up worse things than their administration has been caught doing with little or to consequence. If the VA is the best the US government can do, with some of the most sympathetic citizens, then it is incapable of doing better than our private system.

> You literally couldn't make up worse things than their administration has been caught doing with little or to consequence.

I literally could. The scandals you're referring to basically come down to them having been cooking books about care records. Bad, but not exactly in the realm of "literally nothing worse" hyperbole.

In fact the VA tends to produce health care outcomes that are well within the range of US citizens in the same income bracket (which is to say, not great relative to the rest of hte industrialized world, but not bad) at a cost that is much less than that of private insurance.

Really, you could do a lot worse. The criticism of the VA tends to be very similar to the criticism of the NHS in the UK. It's valid as far as it goes, but... neither UK citizens nor US vets are suffering serious catastrophes here. They're getting care and living decent, healthy lives by any reasonable standard.

Literally.

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#313

Post by chimeracoder »

dnomad wrote: post #231
chimeracoder wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The VA is far from perfect and is really noticeably worse than many other country's nationalized health systems. But it's not obviously worse than private health insurance in the US and generally veterans are as happy with their health care as other people If you want to convince people to support a single-payer system, this is quite possibly the worst argument you could use. Any veteran or anybody who has had any…

> The VA is, on the whole, atrocitous. There are a couple of regions which do relatively well, because the system is federated, but on the whole, it's almost universally considered to be a disaster, even by people who are supportive of the program's existence. Yeah, this is bullshit. The VA and its effectiveness has been studied quite a bit. Its quality has been found to generally exceed the quality of private hospit…

> Its quality has been found to generally exceed the quality of private hospitals. The media and conservatives paint this idea that the VA is "atrocious" but it has no basis in reality.

That's certainly one way to summarize the research around the VA, but it's a highly misleading one. It's easy to cherry-pick the metrics on which the VA performs well, but they're not representative of the big problems that the VA has: massive disparity between regions, accessibility of care, timeliness of interventions, adherence, and so forth. This is why VA hospitals have dramatically worse patient satisfaction rates than their non-VA counterparts. (They actually got in trouble a couple of years ago for misrepresenting and hiding the data around this for a while, until independent studies were done which forced them to admit that they'd redefined their internal metrics to make themselves look better).

As someone who has experience with Medicare and the VA, both on a personal level and on a professional level, nothing makes me more skeptical of arguments advocating single-payer healthcare than people willfully ignoring the vast documented problems that exist with both of those systems. That doesn't mean they're not fixable problems. If you want to advocate for single-payer healthcare and argue why these problems could be fixed in a single-payer system, fine. But don't go around pretending that they don't exist - you can't fix a problem by ignoring it and hoping it will go away.

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#314

Post by RandomCSGeek »

dv_dt wrote: post #295
analog31 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom got injured while hiking in a country with universal care. She hobbled to the next town, found a clinic, and got treated. Then she wanted to pay. First, the person at the clinic said: "What do you mean, you don't pay for health care." My mom explained that she was from another country. It turned out they didn't even have the means to take her money. Treating a few foreigners for free might actually be cheaper…

For small stuff almost certainly, but if you get medical "tourists" explicitly travelling for say cancer treatment?

Keep treatment free only for accidental injuries or harm caused by third parties.

If a country has cheap treatment though, they could earn a lot through medical tourism.

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#315

Post by aninhumer »

Frondo wrote: post #277
Consultant32452 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most economically efficient way to pay for B is to allow the free market to drive the cost of care so low that the person is either able to pay for it, or the cost through charity is trivial. This has the double benefit of not attempting to rectify one moral wrong (person does not receive care) by committing another (violent coercion by the state).

Taxation is not violent coercion by the state and it is disingenuous to describe the former as the latter.

I would argue it is coercive, but so is the property system underpinning the market in the first place. Adding a redistribution element to a system of private property doesn't introduce violent coercion, it merely changes how it is being used to allocate resources.

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#316

Post by fastball »

beagle3 wrote: post #259
fastball wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something has worked for other countries does not mean it will work for the US.

That's true, but since there is an example (tens of them, actually) where it does work well, then the prior should be that it could and should work in the US, and if one thinks it wouldn't work in the US, it should come with an explanation.

The explanation is that the US is huge and UK/Germany/Sweden/whoever is not.

Efficiency doesn't scale proportionally to size, unfortunately.

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#317

Post by Tade0 »

Frondo wrote: post #250
fbunau wrote: post #60

In my country we do have single payer health care, but I wouldn't step foot into a state hospital unless I would have a terminal disease. The infrastructure is old and crumbling, people get infections during operations and walk out more sick than they entered. Sometimes you are asked to bring your own medicine, and basic medical supplies because hospitals don't provide you with anything. The system is overcrowded and…

What country is that?

Romania, apparently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14025864

Which is unsurprising given that it has the lowest per capita healthcare spending in the EU both in terms of absolute values and percentage of GDP: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?...

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#318

Post by DuskStar »

landryraccoon wrote: post #144
edanm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's some serious mental gymnastics going on here to justify that the US spends 2x the next country per capita on health care expenditure and still doesn't manage to pay for all its citizens. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. The US does spend a lot more, and doesn't cover everyone. If I understood the parent post, (part of what) it's saying that the US needs to focus on lowering costs, because otherwi…

> Do you assume that if the US covered everyone, it would be cheaper? Would be great if you could clarify :) Yes, that's exactly true. A lot of countries cover everyone, at a far lower cost per capita. Universal healthcare lowers costs. The evidence simply isn't on the side of the libertarian argument. Universal healthcare has been tried, in many, many countries, and it works just fine. There isn't a single country y…

Universal healthcare doesn't necessarily lower costs - countries that have universal healthcare also tend to pay less for healthcare. Correlation does not equal causation, especially since the arrow arguably goes in the other direction here - in other words, the US would have universal health care if our costs were in line with other first world countries. If that second possibility is the case, implementing universal healthcare in the US might be ruinously expensive...

As for better outcomes, I think that depends on how you define "better" - if I'm remembering correctly the US is still at the top for "healthcare outcomes of the rich and powerful". That's a different criteria, and probably the one most important to the people with the ability to cause change - namely, the rich and powerful!

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#319

Post by SamReidHughes »

knieveltech wrote: post #273
SamReidHughes wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't on the side of any roads here.

Fine. Sidewalk, in the middle of a restaurant, in your livingroom, at the airport. Pick a location and then feel free to explain what selection criteria make ignoring the injuries of another moral.

Okay. I pick any of the injuries of others that you're ignoring right now.

Re: Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits

#320

Post by Proven »

Nonsense.

1) There is no consideration of cost (typical statist nonsense). In most if not all places the healthcare system is piling up debts that will never be paid 2) Every useful activity that the government performs, the private sector does cheaper and better. 3) If it had benefits then people would buy it on their own

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