3 ms·

But we already have socialized medicine. It's just that you have to pay for it.

• anigbrowl 14y ago
  I would vastly rather pay through somewhat higher taxes. I was able to absorb the financial hit in this case, but was lucky that my injuries were relatively mild. But besides the financial side of it, the amount of administration the patient has to go through is absurd, not to mention the ethically dubious gathering of financial information and legal agreements from patients who are in shock or heavily medicated. In countries where the government runs public health (in which I have worked as a medical aide, have a parent who has been a CEO of a national health organization, and have a sibling in medical practice - so I'm not pulling stuff out of thin air), hospitals typically seek to minimize the number of different doctors and nurses that interact with the patient, so as to minimize confusion, miscommunication, and of course cost. Here the opposite seems to be true, as if every doctor on duty felt obliged to provide (and bill for) their medical opinion. Now, I don't want to make a case on a few anecdotal data points, but my personal observations of my own and family members' treatment experiences over the last 10 years, supplemented with observations from friends who are paramedics, nurses and doctors, are that American healthcare is really wasteful and inefficient.