This is how you healthcare: American Death in London

Info about the venture:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/14/vescere-bracis-meis/

Founder reflects on the venture half a year after launch:

http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/07/nsfw-corp-hmtl5/

3000 subscribers at 99 cents per single issue or $26 per 52 issue year as of recently:

http://betabeat.com/2012/09/nsfw-corp-paul-carr-war-nerd-joh...

The one thing I noticed, and it was a rule that didn't have a single exception, was that everyone I talked to could give at least one example of a time when either they or somebody they personally knew had been faced with a ruinous bill for healthcare. People who'd been bankrupted, people who'd fled to another state or even left the country to get away from a hospital bill.

And yet even after seeing whole families' lives literally torn apart, first-hand, they still were against any healthcare reform.

I tried then, and I've tried in the years since, but I simply cannot understand where they're coming from. How anyone can support a healthcare system in this day & age that can, and does, bankrupt or refuse to treat people.. I just can't understand it.

He was a charming, damaged, charismatic, fiercely intelligent, dissolute individual, who lived entirely on his own terms. As a professional gambler, it is unlikely he paid much if any tax in 37 years. He had no will, no funeral plan. He never did fill out the forms necessary to vote in the last election, or the one before that, as I discovered. He just hated forms. I could sympathise. Had he stayed in the US, it is – how you say – dollars to doughnuts he wouldn’t have got it together to fill out the forms, and would have had no health insurance. He considered the US system “absolutely unmanageable”.

However long this goes on for, they'll continue throwing resources at this individual and never show a single sheet of figures to any of his relatives. Not because they'll get anything back, but because this is what the NHS does. It’s free care for throat cancer sufferers who only gave up smoking four years afterwards, for drinkers who were told 35 years ago that if they didn’t quit drinking they’d die. Free care for American immigrants, for jerks and gents. Free care for parents whether they showed up or not. Free care for guys who tried to try. Free care for the only father I will ever have.

So here comes the TANSTAAFL argument: I don't think anyone argues that what the OP describes is a "bad thing"...in fact, I think it's probably the dream scenario that people optimistically assume is the case before they have their first encounter with an emergency room.

But the reason why it doesn't happen is because of cost, plain and simple. And to be concerned about cost is not just the domain of greedy insurers and fat cat cost cutters, but of reasonable people who understand that preventive care is less dramatic than end-of-life care, but is surely as deserving of resources and attention. And both types of care rely on the same limited pot of funding.

It's easy to be emotionally invested in the personal case of a man who is lucky enough to have a loved one so eloquent with words. But what about the hundreds, thousands of routine cases that are treated by NHS with a protocol governed by cost limitations, limitations that will inevitably be imposed by the decision to give blue-chip treatment to the untreatable?

These routine cases don't pull at the heart strings because it is the nature of the human mind not to realize/dwell on how an exam/procedure not scheduled two years ago is the main factor in the chronic disease one suffers today. And yet these people are just as deserving of optimal treatment as OP's Bill. The way that OP judges the value of healthcare, though, means that the Bill's will get a greater share of a finite set of resources. Is this really the way an optimal healthcare system should work?

This is not to say that the U.S. or any other system is currently better than the NHS. It's just to point out that fashion in which the OP (positively) judges the NHS is susceptible to being ignorant of the problems that occur earlier in the pipeline of health.