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Also, if people get the medical attention they need on time, they’d be more productive and also be more active in the economy. The loss of productivity coming f

Also, if people get the medical attention they need on time, they’d be more productive and also be more active in the economy. The loss of productivity coming from inadequate healthcare because of insurance coverages is in the order of tens of Billions annually.

gruez 2y ago
>Also, if people get the medical attention they need on time Unclear whether that would bear fruit, given how socialized healthcare systems have a bad reputation of long wait times.
- semi-extrinsic 2y ago
  I think this is an incorrect impression caused by cherry-picking data. E.g. in the dataset linked below, while some European countries have longer waiting times for elective surgery, they have between 2x and 10x shorter waiting times than the US when it comes to seeing a primary physician. Which is arguably one of the most important metrics for getting people medical attention on time. Furthermore, in many non-US countries you have "controversial" things like emergency contraceptives being prescription free, so people don't even need to see a doctor in the first place. Imagine how much more efficient that is. https://www.statista.com/chart/33079/average-waiting-times-for-a-doctors-appointment/ https://www.statista.com/chart/33079/average-waiting-times-f...
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    That page says the lowest waiting times for surgeries are the USA and Switzerland, which has a mostly private healthcare system and private health insurance. It also claims waiting times for a GP are only ten days on average in the UK which doesn't sound right given the difficulty people have even getting an appointment booked at all lately. I wonder how they compute these numbers.
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  One thing I don’t like about discourse around healthcare is that we automatically talk about socialized healthcare systems being bad. Asking for more transparency and accountability in insurance companies is not unreasonable. You pay thousands of dollars every year to these conpanies only to have your medical procedure delayed because the insurance doesn’t think it’s necessary. If you can’t set up a system that requires insurance to fulfill their duty, make health insurance non mandatory and set up a public system with more accountability. Right now these companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
  - krupan 2y ago
    That's funny because I am disappointed that so many people talk as if socialized healthcare is the miracle cure for all our woes. There are a couple things you just can't get around in any society. The Law of Supply and Demand, and that corporations serve their customers. That second one is the number one problem we have currently in the US. We, the patients, are not the customer. We are are basically a cost of doing business for the "insurance" companies and medical providers. Socialized medicine aims to solve this problem by removing all insurance companies and becoming the single customer for all medical providers, and then dictating how much they will pay. Due to Supply and Demand, if this single customer doesn't offer to pay enough, then the supply of medical care will go down. Again in this scenario, you and I are not the customer. If we don't like this reduction in supply, we don't have much we can do. We aren't allowed to offer to pay more to get what we want. If the government offers to pay more, the supply of medical care will go up, but where does that money come from? You and I, but again, we have almost no say in this.
rstuart4133 2y ago
Here is an observation from someone in a country (Australia) that has mixed public and private. In my country we are continually bombarded with news stories about how bad the public system is. This was puzzling to me, because after experiencing both I think you would be mad to use a private hospital if a public one was available. There are two dynamics at play. The private hospital's customers aren't the patients, it's the doctors. It's the doctors that chose which hospital their customers go to. Thus if the doctor makes a mistake (or the hospital for that matter), it's in the hospitals interests to suppress the news. The information you do see about them is mostly paid advertising. The masters of the public hospitals on the other hand are the politicians. The opposition picks up on each and every failure in a public hospital, and parades it to every media outlet they can find to show had bad at the government in power is. Thus most of the news you here about public hospitals is bad, often very bad, and its a near continuous stream of unflattering news. This means the public hospitals are terrified of making mistakes because it will be publicised. There are literally posters in every public hospital ward advising you how to get 2nd opinions, who you can lodge complains with, and urging you to discuss any concerns with nursing staff. They will follow them up, and they will discipline / exclude doctors that cause trouble. They are free after all, so if the patient can't pay the doctor has no choice. The net result is the public hospitals the standard of care from the patients point of view is usually outstanding. Meanwhile, I've had a father-in-law with heart problems literally half carried out of a private hospital, the nursing assuring us he was fine. I think they needed the bed for a patient paying higher fees. My father-in-law died from the condition a couple of weeks later. It is true that free public hospitals are under funded, and chronically overloaded. Maybe that's probably a tragedy of the commons. The result is non-life threatening treatment can take a long while if you want it for free. But, the public hospitals do take fee paying patients. Insurance companies do pay those fees. When that happens I haven't noticed any wait times. In other words the USA system is available to those who can afford it, and those who can't wait. The major difference with the USA is they don't have the "free" option. The "wait times" thing you referred to is therefore 1/2 true, 1/2 myth.

gruez 2y ago

>Also, if people get the medical attention they need on time Unclear whether that would bear fruit, given how socialized healthcare systems have a bad reputation of long wait times.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago
I think this is an incorrect impression caused by cherry-picking data. E.g. in the dataset linked below, while some European countries have longer waiting times for elective surgery, they have between 2x and 10x shorter waiting times than the US when it comes to seeing a primary physician. Which is arguably one of the most important metrics for getting people medical attention on time. Furthermore, in many non-US countries you have "controversial" things like emergency contraceptives being prescription free, so people don't even need to see a doctor in the first place. Imagine how much more efficient that is. https://www.statista.com/chart/33079/average-waiting-times-for-a-doctors-appointment/ https://www.statista.com/chart/33079/average-waiting-times-f...
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  That page says the lowest waiting times for surgeries are the USA and Switzerland, which has a mostly private healthcare system and private health insurance. It also claims waiting times for a GP are only ten days on average in the UK which doesn't sound right given the difficulty people have even getting an appointment booked at all lately. I wonder how they compute these numbers.
darth_avocado 2y ago
One thing I don’t like about discourse around healthcare is that we automatically talk about socialized healthcare systems being bad. Asking for more transparency and accountability in insurance companies is not unreasonable. You pay thousands of dollars every year to these conpanies only to have your medical procedure delayed because the insurance doesn’t think it’s necessary. If you can’t set up a system that requires insurance to fulfill their duty, make health insurance non mandatory and set up a public system with more accountability. Right now these companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
- krupan 2y ago
  That's funny because I am disappointed that so many people talk as if socialized healthcare is the miracle cure for all our woes. There are a couple things you just can't get around in any society. The Law of Supply and Demand, and that corporations serve their customers. That second one is the number one problem we have currently in the US. We, the patients, are not the customer. We are are basically a cost of doing business for the "insurance" companies and medical providers. Socialized medicine aims to solve this problem by removing all insurance companies and becoming the single customer for all medical providers, and then dictating how much they will pay. Due to Supply and Demand, if this single customer doesn't offer to pay enough, then the supply of medical care will go down. Again in this scenario, you and I are not the customer. If we don't like this reduction in supply, we don't have much we can do. We aren't allowed to offer to pay more to get what we want. If the government offers to pay more, the supply of medical care will go up, but where does that money come from? You and I, but again, we have almost no say in this.

rstuart4133 2y ago

Here is an observation from someone in a country (Australia) that has mixed public and private. In my country we are continually bombarded with news stories about how bad the public system is. This was puzzling to me, because after experiencing both I think you would be mad to use a private hospital if a public one was available. There are two dynamics at play. The private hospital's customers aren't the patients, it's the doctors. It's the doctors that chose which hospital their customers go to. Thus if the doctor makes a mistake (or the hospital for that matter), it's in the hospitals interests to suppress the news. The information you do see about them is mostly paid advertising. The masters of the public hospitals on the other hand are the politicians. The opposition picks up on each and every failure in a public hospital, and parades it to every media outlet they can find to show had bad at the government in power is. Thus most of the news you here about public hospitals is bad, often very bad, and its a near continuous stream of unflattering news. This means the public hospitals are terrified of making mistakes because it will be publicised. There are literally posters in every public hospital ward advising you how to get 2nd opinions, who you can lodge complains with, and urging you to discuss any concerns with nursing staff. They will follow them up, and they will discipline / exclude doctors that cause trouble. They are free after all, so if the patient can't pay the doctor has no choice. The net result is the public hospitals the standard of care from the patients point of view is usually outstanding. Meanwhile, I've had a father-in-law with heart problems literally half carried out of a private hospital, the nursing assuring us he was fine. I think they needed the bed for a patient paying higher fees. My father-in-law died from the condition a couple of weeks later. It is true that free public hospitals are under funded, and chronically overloaded. Maybe that's probably a tragedy of the commons. The result is non-life threatening treatment can take a long while if you want it for free. But, the public hospitals do take fee paying patients. Insurance companies do pay those fees. When that happens I haven't noticed any wait times. In other words the USA system is available to those who can afford it, and those who can't wait. The major difference with the USA is they don't have the "free" option. The "wait times" thing you referred to is therefore 1/2 true, 1/2 myth.