What's "great" about European systems is your costs are 50% less than the US, you get 100% coverage of everyone and you get better health care results. In the US, 50% of all personal bankruptcies are due to medical cost. Most of those bankruptcies are people who had "health insurance". That doesn't happen in European systems.
Consider that in US system, whatever you pay now you would pay twice as much for being healthy and if you actually needed health care you would pay twice as much again for the services received. If you survived that financial disaster, you would then lose your health care coverage because you got sick and had a "pre-existing" condition.
And don't get sick or injured if you visit the US. Consider Sarah Burke, the Canadian skier, gets injured in practice and dies. The US hospital came after her family for over $500,000 and "settled" for $285,000.
For US to adopt any of the various modern European systems would mean an additional $1.4T (10% of US GDP) would NOT be spent on health care in the US, or more correctly, would not be spent on insurance.
US system is a hard to imagine rocky horror show. We have a system out of Kafka meets Adam Smith. It simply doesn't work for anyone other than the insurance companies.
They don't actually. It's a total fiction that any significant numbers of Canadians come to US for health care. Far more Americans go to Mexico and India to get affordable care
Nor can you refuse their $20,000 bill for your emergency care that you wouldn't have needed if you had regular medical care. That's if you survive the hours long wait for "emergency" care in overcrowded, understaffed, hospital ER filled with people who have no other access to medical care.
Holy crap, BGL.... you pretty much called it on the issues. Bravo.
To me, the biggest point you have made, which has gone largely unaddressed in much of the discussion is the disgusting fact that the insurance companies have a "de facto" monopoly on health care. They get to set prices through bargaining power, deny coverage with impunity, and get away with being a "death panel" of the worst sort.
In the US, try for laughs getting an estimate of health care costs before you "purchase" health care. In my experience, you can't, at least not that the health care providers will honor. Ask for the cost of a procedure/drug/treatment beforehand and you will get demurrals, denials and a really difficult time in getting a quote. I did this with my wife's pregnancy. Finally, got quoted a bottom line figure, paid it, and then got additional bills after the fact (about 300% above what I negotiated). After the fact negotiation? A joke. I got a ton of different answers, different prices quoted based on where we were in the process (a percentage discount offered if paid in one lump sum, advisement to ignore the bills until referred out to collection- which supposedly will give better terms than the hospital will provide, even thought the collections is within the hospital, repeated referral to social services, which we don't qualify for, and no one can tell us what the basis for the bill is...oh, and multiple people within the same hospital give different "bills" due. Offers to pay an amount got different responses from different departments. Remember, this was after having negotiated a flat fee of $16,000 which I paid upfront. "Magically" the earlier agreement was not honored (little explanation as to why, but was told the price of services was higher than the original quoted fee; sure, if push comes to shove, I will be able to raise the original agreement as a defense...but outside of court, I am at the whim of the medical bill collectors). However, the same folks are happy to explain that if I am destitute, they will forgive and write off the entire bill. But, if I can pay, they are intent on chasing me for multiples above what they originally agreed to as a flat fee.
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For that matter, try discussing prices with hospitals and other providers. Eight years ago, my wife needed an MRI, but we did not have health insurance. I called up several area hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices—all within about a one-mile radius—to find the best price. I was surprised to discover that prices quoted, for an identical service, varied widely, and that the lowest price was $1,200. But what was truly astonishing was that several providers refused to quote any price. Only if I came in and actually ordered the MRI could we discuss price.
Several years later, when we were preparing for the birth of our second child, I requested the total cost of the delivery and related procedures from our hospital. The answer: the hospital discussed price only with uninsured patients. What about my co-pay? They would discuss my potential co-pay only if I were applying for financial assistance.
Keeping prices opaque is one way medical institutions seek to avoid competition and thereby keep prices up. And they get away with it in part because so few consumers pay directly for their own care—insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid are basically the whole game. But without transparency on prices—and the related data on measurable outcomes—efforts to give the consumer more control over health care have failed, and always will.
Here’s a wonderful example of price opacity. Advocates for the uninsured complain that hospitals charge uninsured patients, on average, 2.5 times the amount charged to insured patients. Hospitals defend themselves by contending that they earn from uninsured patients only 25 percent of the amount they do from insured ones. Both statements appear to be true!
How is this possible? Well, hospitals bill according to their price lists, but provide large discounts to major insurers. Individual consumers, of course, don’t benefit from these discounts, so they receive their bills at full list price (typically about 2.5 times the bill to an insured patient). Uninsured patients, however, pay according to how much of the bill the hospital believes they can afford (which, on average, amounts to 25 percent of the amount paid by an insured patient). Nonetheless, whatever discount a hospital gives to an uninsured patient is entirely at its discretion—and is typically negotiated only after the fact. Some uninsured patients have been driven into bankruptcy by hospital collections. American industry may offer no better example of pernicious “price discrimination,” nor one that entails greater financial vulnerability for American families."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...american-health-care-killed-my-father/7617/4/
The entire system is broken.
