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As an European living in the US, the US health system is so utterly broken and asinine, it's not even funny. You take a non-free market (I get sick, I need hel
by pinaceae 11y ago
As an European living in the US, the US health system is so utterly broken and asinine, it's not even funny.
You take a non-free market (I get sick, I need help - no choice involved) and apply seemingly free market logic to it. The result is a disaster, tada.
Single payer, all the way, everyday. Add private, optional insurance on top to allow well-off people to get private rooms, etc. But no one should worry about going bankrupt over medical bills, ever.
And yes, Austria is living proof that such a system can exist, with awesome results. Including electronic health records, the e-card etc. - all sci-fi ideas that US super genius companies like Google, MS, a myriad of startups cannot create.
- novalis78 11y agoIt's not a free market system. I wish it was. It's amazing how people vote for government protected cartels. It took the press (Time magazine article two years back) an incredibly long time to start digging into fraudulent healthcare pricing - since then some things have started moving (legislation in some states to force hospitals to show prices, at least to bring in some semblance of a market and allow market forces to start operating). In a true free market environment such abuse by an incumbent/system would lead to innovation and new ideas that would quickly obliterate the monopoly, in this case the monopoly has the guns (i.e. regulation/government protected insurance and health care industry). Disclaimer: I lived in Austria/Germany for decades and their system is worse because it's totally closed to any potential market innovation while taxing the living daylights out of the middle class.