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"The notion that everyone should be guaranteed equal health outcomes is a very seductive one, but once you start digging into the details it falls apart quite r

"The notion that everyone should be guaranteed equal health outcomes is a very seductive one, but once you start digging into the details it falls apart quite rapidly." Falls apart exactly how? Seems to work fine in just about every country that's tried it (which is most of the first world). Mind you, it's not really the health outcome that's guaranteed (obviously that's going to depend on individual constitution, age and lifestyle) but access to the same level of care is seen as a given. In my town recently there was a minor scandal when a pro hockey player showed up with a game injury at a local emergency ward and went to the head of the line. The hospital had to scramble to explain that his injury went through normal triage. You talk about bankrupting the public, but clearly it's the far more expensive US system that is bankrupting the public (along with providing worse outcomes overall). For those of use who have grown up with publicly funded healthcare, a fully private system seems primitive, barbaric and inhumane equivalent to having firefighting or police services exclusively for those who can afford it.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
This explains why Canadians, including MPs, sometimes come to the US for care, and why the Queen of England went to a private hospital when she developed gastroenteritis, right? It's silly to imagine that there isn't or shouldn't be a relationship between level of care and cost of care, even if we desire for the costs of most common life-saving care to be "socialized" in some way. Demanding that all care be the best possible care is a non-starter because that's clearly not financially feasible. Some folks can afford to spend multiples of the average per capita GDP on their health care, and that's just not physically possible for everyone to do. As for your straw man about a "fully private system", I made no mention of that, nor have I advocated such. I was merely making an isolated point. You can put your pitchforks back in the shed and put down your "libertarianism = somalia!" signs. Our system is clearly broken, but the idea that other systems aren't also broken in various ways is naive. There's no silver bullet that will solve the problems of cost and access to health care, and that includes the extraordinarily naive idea of just making "government" pay for it all.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

This explains why Canadians, including MPs, sometimes come to the US for care, and why the Queen of England went to a private hospital when she developed gastroenteritis, right? It's silly to imagine that there isn't or shouldn't be a relationship between level of care and cost of care, even if we desire for the costs of most common life-saving care to be "socialized" in some way. Demanding that all care be the best possible care is a non-starter because that's clearly not financially feasible. Some folks can afford to spend multiples of the average per capita GDP on their health care, and that's just not physically possible for everyone to do. As for your straw man about a "fully private system", I made no mention of that, nor have I advocated such. I was merely making an isolated point. You can put your pitchforks back in the shed and put down your "libertarianism = somalia!" signs. Our system is clearly broken, but the idea that other systems aren't also broken in various ways is naive. There's no silver bullet that will solve the problems of cost and access to health care, and that includes the extraordinarily naive idea of just making "government" pay for it all.