4 ms·

while I agree we need some sort of nationalized health care and should learn from the countries that have implemented it, I'm not sure thats the strong success

while I agree we need some sort of nationalized health care and should learn from the countries that have implemented it, I'm not sure thats the strong success you think it is? Just recently we had a bunch of comments here on HN about how bad candian health care can be if you live in the 'wrong' area. UK has had issues with NHS for decades at least (hell, they ALSO have 'private' insurance which seems to be almost a requirement). And several other EU countries have hit issues with healthcare lately (charge fat people/smokers more since they use more resources was fairly divisive recently. Personally - I think it all boils down to scale. As these systems grow, it becomes harder to sustain them. That doesn't bode well for the US with 10x the population of Canada :-( It sucks because I'd really like it, and I'd love not having my health care tied to my job ...

goodcanadian 2y ago
As a Canadian who has lived in the United States and in the United Kingdom, I can say without a doubt that both Canada and the UK beat the US "system" by a mile. While their universal healthcare can have problems, the problems in the US system are far worse.
- mech422 2y ago
  Yeah - I have family in both countries (parents: mom & family from Leeds, dad and family from London cousins: I don't actually know where in Canada they are now) Obviously, there is a lot of good stuff we can copy/learn from both countries. The thing is to make sure we can iron out as many issues as possible (large population and geographic area mostly) before we attempt something and having politicians claim it "doesn't work". Seem my response to isleyaardvark above for my (stupid) idea to try to us the VA hospitals to test bed some of this. Thanks!
isleyaardvark 2y ago
Not too long ago I saw an article from a Canadian source about how bad Canadian healthcare was getting, and complaining Canada had or was about to drop out of the top 10 rankings. It had a scatter chart showing the metrics, and while Canada was shown as lower than many of the other countries, the gap between all those countries and the US was enormous. When other countries complain about their healthcare, they're complaining about complaining about sane systems not performing to their standards, and that doesn't make the US any less of a dumpster fire.
- mech422 2y ago
  I agree, single payer/universal health should be a table stakes. And I wasn't picking on Canada - it seems to be a better system all around. But all systems can be improved (as you mentioned). If we're going to this from scratch, shouldn't we look at all the systems and try to follow the 'best practices' from all of them ? One reason I look at Canada so much is the population is almost 1/10th of the U.S. population - so I would expect (naively) all issues would be magnified 10x. Also, the pain points with Canada's healthcare seems to be in scaling and funding as the population grows? Scaling up the number of doctors/hospitals available - to cut wait times, and providing consistent funding not based on where you live. Definitely solvable and much better then the issues the US healthcare system has. For the US, I think good way to start might be to actually fund the VA Hospitals and see what it takes to properly run a national health organization in the US. How many doctors does it require? How many hospitals? What sort of budget? etc. If we can scale up the VA to provide quality healthcare without the under staffing, waits, long distances between facilities, etc across the entire country - then we can use those lessons to scale up to true universal healthcare? The last thing we want to do is introduce some half-assed 'designed to fail' system that lets politicians just say 'yeah, we tried that...Didn't work' Thanks!

goodcanadian 2y ago

As a Canadian who has lived in the United States and in the United Kingdom, I can say without a doubt that both Canada and the UK beat the US "system" by a mile. While their universal healthcare can have problems, the problems in the US system are far worse.

mech422 2y ago
Yeah - I have family in both countries (parents: mom & family from Leeds, dad and family from London cousins: I don't actually know where in Canada they are now) Obviously, there is a lot of good stuff we can copy/learn from both countries. The thing is to make sure we can iron out as many issues as possible (large population and geographic area mostly) before we attempt something and having politicians claim it "doesn't work". Seem my response to isleyaardvark above for my (stupid) idea to try to us the VA hospitals to test bed some of this. Thanks!

isleyaardvark 2y ago

Not too long ago I saw an article from a Canadian source about how bad Canadian healthcare was getting, and complaining Canada had or was about to drop out of the top 10 rankings. It had a scatter chart showing the metrics, and while Canada was shown as lower than many of the other countries, the gap between all those countries and the US was enormous. When other countries complain about their healthcare, they're complaining about complaining about sane systems not performing to their standards, and that doesn't make the US any less of a dumpster fire.

mech422 2y ago
I agree, single payer/universal health should be a table stakes. And I wasn't picking on Canada - it seems to be a better system all around. But all systems can be improved (as you mentioned). If we're going to this from scratch, shouldn't we look at all the systems and try to follow the 'best practices' from all of them ? One reason I look at Canada so much is the population is almost 1/10th of the U.S. population - so I would expect (naively) all issues would be magnified 10x. Also, the pain points with Canada's healthcare seems to be in scaling and funding as the population grows? Scaling up the number of doctors/hospitals available - to cut wait times, and providing consistent funding not based on where you live. Definitely solvable and much better then the issues the US healthcare system has. For the US, I think good way to start might be to actually fund the VA Hospitals and see what it takes to properly run a national health organization in the US. How many doctors does it require? How many hospitals? What sort of budget? etc. If we can scale up the VA to provide quality healthcare without the under staffing, waits, long distances between facilities, etc across the entire country - then we can use those lessons to scale up to true universal healthcare? The last thing we want to do is introduce some half-assed 'designed to fail' system that lets politicians just say 'yeah, we tried that...Didn't work' Thanks!