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> Time to join the 21st century and push for universal healthcare. No it's not. Source: I'm a Finn. Compare two scenarios: A) Healthcare is run with money

> Time to join the 21st century and push for universal healthcare. No it's not. Source: I'm a Finn. Compare two scenarios: A) Healthcare is run with money that's just taken from people. B) Healthcare is run as a business, with people paying for it voluntarily. Which one do you think will be better quality? Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" are just forced to come to you and pay for your services. Are you motivated to: 1) provide them with good service, 2) keep your costs low, 3) maintain high standards? The obvious answers are: No, No, and No, and that's exactly what happens with everything that's run by any government, because it's always with someone else's money and the "customers" aren't actually customers - they have no choice. It's rather unsurprising, then, that Finland's public healthcare system is of poor quality, and that we have to wait for weeks or months for an appointment.

nwh 13y ago
I live in Australia, our healthcare is universally free and of very high quality. I don't have a problem walking into any clinic in my area and getting free, prompt medical service. Just because yours sucks doesn't mean it's a bad idea to begin with.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  > Just because yours sucks doesn't mean it's a bad idea to begin with. I didn't say it's a bad idea because ours sucks. I said it's a bad idea because if you're using money that's just taken from other people, you're not motivated to provide them with good service, and so on. The factors I listed cannot be escaped. You can rest assured that your system is slowly turning to shit too.
  - angersock 13y ago
    What if your motivation is to care for other people and to provide the best service you know how to? Your model is flawed.
    - whatevsbro 13y ago
      > What if your motivation is to care for other people and to provide the best service you know how to? What if you're not actually the people who run the system? Your question about some random, individual good doctors is not related to how the whole healthcare system is run and what can be expected based on it.
  - nwh 13y ago
    If you're going to have that attitude you'd better not be using our roads, parks, public transport or indeed any other government services that have "stolen" money from you. I think you'd be a lot worse off if you decided not to pay tax and go without everything being a taxpayer entitles you to.
    - programmarchy 13y ago
      Hm, that's not a very good argument. If a slave takes a meal from his master, it doesn't mean he must condone slavery.
    - whatevsbro 13y ago
      > If you're going to have that attitude you'd better not be using our roads, parks, public transport or indeed any other government services that have "stolen" money from you First, taxation is not "stealing", it's literally extortion. A mafia makes it clear that if you don't pay them "protection money", they will hurt you, and governments make it clear that if we don't pay taxes, we will be forcibly hauled to jail etc. In both cases, you're making payments under the threat of violence. Taxation is extortion. Second, your argument is that I shouldn't complain about taxation because I'm using the services funded by it. This makes no sense for at least two reasons: 1) I can't not use the services, and 2) extortion is still extortion, and immoral to begin with. If McDonald's decides to extort money from you, and then rams a Big Mac down your throat "in return", does the Big Mac entering your stomach make extortion moral?
    - whatevsbro 13y ago
      Oh, I forgot: > I think you'd be a lot worse off if you decided not to pay tax and go without everything being a taxpayer entitles you to. Here it's worth pointing out that I can do neither. I can't not pay taxes, and I can't not use the services provided with tax money. Also, thinking that being a taxpayer "entitles" you to something is wrong. First, you have no choice. Again, you don't choose to "be a taxpayer", and being extorted doesn't "entitle" you to anything - you're just extorted and lose money. It's not like your extorters are interested in giving you anything, they're only interested in taking from you.
- jedmeyers 13y ago
  "I don't have a problem walking into any clinic in my area and getting free, prompt medical service." - does "prompt" mean waiting 265 days for an elective surgery?
  - nwh 13y ago
    I've never needed to have elective surgery, so I can't comment on that.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - jedmeyers 13y ago
      Then I would say that your understanding of Australian medical system is somewhat idealized.
      - nwh 13y ago
        Elective surgery is pretty clear in it's definition. If it was life threatening it wouldn't be an elective procedure.
- programmarchy 13y ago
  Free? It's paid for by taxation and national debt. Funny thing is, you probably couldn't even calculate the cost, because prices are heavily distorted or even incalculable in socialized markets. ``...pricing systems in socialist economies were necessarily deficient because if government owned or controlled the means of production, then no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods as they were merely internal transfers of goods in a socialist system and not "objects of exchange," unlike final goods. Therefore, they were unpriced and hence the system would be necessarily inefficient since the central planners would not know how to allocate the available resources efficiently. This led him to declare "...that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth."'' http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Your post makes some weird assumptions and errors. The UK system has competition. For example: an NHS trust might provide drug and alcohol services. When the contract is renewed a charity might win that contract. Your post also makes the weird assumption that supplies (medication, medical devices, dressings etc, beds and sheets and food and everything) is all also owned and provided by the government. They are not, they are made and sold by private companies to other companies - some of those are private companies, some of them are foundation trusts. Modern health provision is much much more complex than "the government does it". You should investigate the NHS because it's fascinating,even for people ideologically opposed to this model of health care provision.
    - whatevsbro 13y ago
      > Your post makes some weird assumptions and errors. No it doesn't. > The UK system has competition. For example: an NHS trust might provide drug and alcohol services. When the contract is renewed a charity might win that contract. The competition is a sham. The contract goes to whoever is the chummiest with the right people in power. > Your post also makes the weird assumption that supplies (medication, medical devices, dressings etc, beds and sheets and food and everything) is all also owned and provided by the government. His post did contain the word "socialist", but that doesn't mean he's assuming what you described there. I believe he just wanted to make a point about "socialist" policies, like public healthcare. Sure, the word can be defined in various ways, but healthcare is what we were talking about. The lesson here is that it's just inevitably going to be worse run than a business would be. The Mises quote wasn't directly related, but it's a good idea to read whatever Mises had to say. You might learn something about how economies really work.
- semerda 13y ago
  You still need private insurance to get around the quirks and delays of the public system. Saying that private insurance in AU wont cost you an arm and a leg like in the USA.
Guvante 13y ago
To be fair, option B doesn't work unless you allow the program to self select away from people who game the system. Given that companies loved playing games to expand what gaming meant, I am not surprised they decided to do something.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  > option B doesn't work unless you allow the program to self select away from people who game the system Well why would you not "allow" it, and what's the alternative? Credit card companies are "self-selecting" away from people who game the system, right? It works the same for any business that needs to worry about people gaming their system.
  - Guvante 13y ago
    The healthcare industry was taking their self selection to the extreme. The evidence of it is too much to consider it as anything else. If they were good about their self selection process we wouldn't have mandatory health coverage right now. Hell the entire problem could potentially be put on their decision to go away from properly underwriting and just checking when something came up.
DanBC 13y ago
I live in England. I can get an appointment with a family doctor at my surgery within 24 hours and with the doctor of my choice almost always within 48 hours. There are peoblems with people mis-using a&e services, but i know that I still get excellent treatment there. I get a choice of hospitals for elective surgeries. Some services are really struggling: drug and alcohol rehab; a&e; mental health services; especially mental health services for young people. But on the whole it it pretty good.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  You may have noticed the Western world's economies swirling down the toilet, yes? Enjoy it while it lasts. But don't think it's going to "work" for ever.
MereInterest 13y ago
B is not at all a fair description. If a robber has a gun to my head, any transaction is far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise. If I were to have a terminal illness, any transaction would be far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise. A) Healthcare is negotiated by individuals, fearful for their lives, and with no other options. B) Healthcare is negotiated by bulk, by experts with the authority to set minimum standards of care. Which one will be better quality? Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" will starve to death if they can't drive to the closest grocery store 100 miles away. Are you motivated to: 1) provide permanent service that won't break down again, 2) avoid gouging customers, 3) maintain high standards? The obvious answers are: No, No, and No, and that's exactly what happens with everything that's run by any corporation, because it's always a contract between an amoral company and an individual responsibilities. It's rather unsurprising, then, that the USA's healthcare system is of poor quality, and that people can easily be driven into bankruptcy by medical costs.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  > B is not at all a fair description. If a robber has a gun to my head, any transaction is far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise Option B was running healthcare as a business, with voluntary customers. You seem to be talking about something else.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  If a robber has a gun to my head... This is the third time I've heard this comparison on HN, and it still confuses me. It is probably true that people in poor health are very interested in receiving health care, but that does not equate to being forced to use a particular provider, or to accepting service under onerous terms. The point of running health care like a normal business is that if one physician is overcharging or underdelivering you can just go to a different one. Maybe whatevsbro's experience doesn't match your own, but you can't dismiss it so glibly, and in that experience, patients in a "universal" system don't have the option of choosing.
beat 13y ago
If your basis for arguing is cost, then you're not making a very good argument. The American system costs roughly twice what other civilized nations pay for health care per capita, and we have around 15% of the country not covered at all. Per capita cost is about 2.5 times that of Finland, and about twice that of Finland as a percentage of GDP. See charts here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how... The "choice" argument is also suspect, on a deep level. Americans are often trapped in jobs they hate, for fear of losing their health insurance if they quit or take another job. Worse, it hampers small businesses, that find it nearly impossible to provide insurance for their employees. Meanwhile, employees have little or no choice about the insurance plans they get. The current American system is an expensive, incompetent failure. The ACA was designed to try to fix some of the gross problems (lack of coverage for 15% of the population, mostly), but protect the core design of employer-provided private insurance. That's why the software failed. It's incredibly complex, and that complexity drives costs.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  > If your basis for arguing is cost, then you're not making a very good argument. It's not. It's that any service that's run with money that's just confiscated from other people will be poor quality, because there's no motivation to provide good quality, because you don't actually have customers. You get to choose between an Android phone or an iPhone, for example. Imagine you were forced to only buy Android phones. Do you think they'd be good quality?
  - beat 13y ago
    In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. You're talking theory (or more precisely, you're talking ideology). The observed data is that the American system is over twice as expensive as the average of comparable countries, and half again as expensive as its nearest competitors, while the results are little better and often worse. If your ideology of confiscation and motivation does not explain the observed facts, then your ideology is wrong, not the facts. That's what makes them facts.
fragmede 13y ago
> Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" are just forced to come to you and pay for your services. Are you motivated to: 1) provide them with good service, 2) keep your costs low, 3) maintain high standards? Suppose this car repair shop is allowed to keep the true cost of your service a secret - what's an itemized receipt. Suppose it's not the car's owner that's paying for it, it's an insurance company, but instead of there being a free market of insurance companies, there's only a couple of them, and they're the ones building car repair shops. Suppose running a car repair shop is surrounded by untold layers of red tape, since if your car dies, you're not allowed to get another one, so few people are able start their own. Suppose your car has non-standard parts, and you can't simply buy a replacement OEM part that will work. Suppose your car came from the factory with several design problems it's simply impossible to permanently fix. Suppose car repair shops had a history of gouging people so badly that the gut-wrenching stories of people dying penniless from cancer caused people to call their congressman such that they demanded a change to the existing car-repair system... I could go on, but health care isn't car repair.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  I'm well aware that the US healthcare system is utterly fucked, for the reasons you listed (and more). > I could go on, but health care isn't car repair. That's why it was an analogy.
Sambdala 13y ago
Prefacing this with that I'm about as Libertarian as they come, and I'm under no auspices that the US/anywhere has a free market in healthcare. edit: I also went from dirt-poor (and I'm assuming really horrible) health insurance plans in the US to having ridiculously good private insurance in the UK, so I'm already aware I'm entering into a supremely Apples v. Oranges scenario as is. I've lived in both the US and the UK (well, the Isle of Man; I've heard NHS is much more of a pain in the ass in the mainland UK), and I'm just shocked at how awful the customer service has always been in the US. In the US, I have never arrived at a doctor's appointment without waiting far past the time the appointment was scheduled to start and then waiting for the GP to actually come to the appointment room once you're seated there. In the UK (so far), I've seen the estimated time left before my appointment on an LED screen, and then both been led to the room on time and had the GP come in almost immediately. In every aspect of healthcare in the US, I've been shocked at how long you're just expected to wait for absolutely everything. Even if you arrive early, you sign in, wait in a room full of sick people for (on average IME) 40+ minutes past your appointment time, and then you wait an additional 15+ minutes for the GP to actually come into the room to begin the appointment. It actually makes me physically angry to think about how much time I've spent waiting in a doctor's room over the first 20-something years of my life. In your scenario B), I'd expect to be able to book an appointment online, arrive two minutes before it's scheduled to start, and walk out fifteen minutes later with whatever result you were looking for 99% of the time. To be fair, I've visited my general practitioner exactly twice since I've moved here, so I have no sample size; and as I previously stated, I live in an area that has a reputation for having much better healthcare than the mainland UK.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  > Prefacing this with that I'm about as Libertarian as they come Sweet. Are you ready to take the next, and final step? They say that the difference between a Libertarian and an Anarchist is roughly six months (paraphrased). > In every aspect of healthcare in the US, I've been shocked at how long you're just expected to wait for absolutely everything. Yeah, it's completely fucked. Finland's system is similar in the waiting sense, at least. > In your scenario B), I'd expect to be able to book an appointment online, arrive two minutes before it's scheduled to start, and walk out fifteen minutes later with whatever result you were looking for 99% of the time. Exactly.

nwh 13y ago

I live in Australia, our healthcare is universally free and of very high quality. I don't have a problem walking into any clinic in my area and getting free, prompt medical service. Just because yours sucks doesn't mean it's a bad idea to begin with.

whatevsbro 13y ago
> Just because yours sucks doesn't mean it's a bad idea to begin with. I didn't say it's a bad idea because ours sucks. I said it's a bad idea because if you're using money that's just taken from other people, you're not motivated to provide them with good service, and so on. The factors I listed cannot be escaped. You can rest assured that your system is slowly turning to shit too.
- angersock 13y ago
  What if your motivation is to care for other people and to provide the best service you know how to? Your model is flawed.
  - whatevsbro 13y ago
    > What if your motivation is to care for other people and to provide the best service you know how to? What if you're not actually the people who run the system? Your question about some random, individual good doctors is not related to how the whole healthcare system is run and what can be expected based on it.
- nwh 13y ago
  If you're going to have that attitude you'd better not be using our roads, parks, public transport or indeed any other government services that have "stolen" money from you. I think you'd be a lot worse off if you decided not to pay tax and go without everything being a taxpayer entitles you to.
  - programmarchy 13y ago
    Hm, that's not a very good argument. If a slave takes a meal from his master, it doesn't mean he must condone slavery.
  - whatevsbro 13y ago
    > If you're going to have that attitude you'd better not be using our roads, parks, public transport or indeed any other government services that have "stolen" money from you First, taxation is not "stealing", it's literally extortion. A mafia makes it clear that if you don't pay them "protection money", they will hurt you, and governments make it clear that if we don't pay taxes, we will be forcibly hauled to jail etc. In both cases, you're making payments under the threat of violence. Taxation is extortion. Second, your argument is that I shouldn't complain about taxation because I'm using the services funded by it. This makes no sense for at least two reasons: 1) I can't not use the services, and 2) extortion is still extortion, and immoral to begin with. If McDonald's decides to extort money from you, and then rams a Big Mac down your throat "in return", does the Big Mac entering your stomach make extortion moral?
  - whatevsbro 13y ago
    Oh, I forgot: > I think you'd be a lot worse off if you decided not to pay tax and go without everything being a taxpayer entitles you to. Here it's worth pointing out that I can do neither. I can't not pay taxes, and I can't not use the services provided with tax money. Also, thinking that being a taxpayer "entitles" you to something is wrong. First, you have no choice. Again, you don't choose to "be a taxpayer", and being extorted doesn't "entitle" you to anything - you're just extorted and lose money. It's not like your extorters are interested in giving you anything, they're only interested in taking from you.
jedmeyers 13y ago
"I don't have a problem walking into any clinic in my area and getting free, prompt medical service." - does "prompt" mean waiting 265 days for an elective surgery?
- nwh 13y ago
  I've never needed to have elective surgery, so I can't comment on that.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jedmeyers 13y ago
    Then I would say that your understanding of Australian medical system is somewhat idealized.
    - nwh 13y ago
      Elective surgery is pretty clear in it's definition. If it was life threatening it wouldn't be an elective procedure.
programmarchy 13y ago
Free? It's paid for by taxation and national debt. Funny thing is, you probably couldn't even calculate the cost, because prices are heavily distorted or even incalculable in socialized markets. ``...pricing systems in socialist economies were necessarily deficient because if government owned or controlled the means of production, then no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods as they were merely internal transfers of goods in a socialist system and not "objects of exchange," unlike final goods. Therefore, they were unpriced and hence the system would be necessarily inefficient since the central planners would not know how to allocate the available resources efficiently. This led him to declare "...that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth."'' http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
- DanBC 13y ago
  Your post makes some weird assumptions and errors. The UK system has competition. For example: an NHS trust might provide drug and alcohol services. When the contract is renewed a charity might win that contract. Your post also makes the weird assumption that supplies (medication, medical devices, dressings etc, beds and sheets and food and everything) is all also owned and provided by the government. They are not, they are made and sold by private companies to other companies - some of those are private companies, some of them are foundation trusts. Modern health provision is much much more complex than "the government does it". You should investigate the NHS because it's fascinating,even for people ideologically opposed to this model of health care provision.
  - whatevsbro 13y ago
    > Your post makes some weird assumptions and errors. No it doesn't. > The UK system has competition. For example: an NHS trust might provide drug and alcohol services. When the contract is renewed a charity might win that contract. The competition is a sham. The contract goes to whoever is the chummiest with the right people in power. > Your post also makes the weird assumption that supplies (medication, medical devices, dressings etc, beds and sheets and food and everything) is all also owned and provided by the government. His post did contain the word "socialist", but that doesn't mean he's assuming what you described there. I believe he just wanted to make a point about "socialist" policies, like public healthcare. Sure, the word can be defined in various ways, but healthcare is what we were talking about. The lesson here is that it's just inevitably going to be worse run than a business would be. The Mises quote wasn't directly related, but it's a good idea to read whatever Mises had to say. You might learn something about how economies really work.
semerda 13y ago
You still need private insurance to get around the quirks and delays of the public system. Saying that private insurance in AU wont cost you an arm and a leg like in the USA.

Guvante 13y ago

To be fair, option B doesn't work unless you allow the program to self select away from people who game the system. Given that companies loved playing games to expand what gaming meant, I am not surprised they decided to do something.

whatevsbro 13y ago
> option B doesn't work unless you allow the program to self select away from people who game the system Well why would you not "allow" it, and what's the alternative? Credit card companies are "self-selecting" away from people who game the system, right? It works the same for any business that needs to worry about people gaming their system.
- Guvante 13y ago
  The healthcare industry was taking their self selection to the extreme. The evidence of it is too much to consider it as anything else. If they were good about their self selection process we wouldn't have mandatory health coverage right now. Hell the entire problem could potentially be put on their decision to go away from properly underwriting and just checking when something came up.

DanBC 13y ago

I live in England. I can get an appointment with a family doctor at my surgery within 24 hours and with the doctor of my choice almost always within 48 hours. There are peoblems with people mis-using a&e services, but i know that I still get excellent treatment there. I get a choice of hospitals for elective surgeries. Some services are really struggling: drug and alcohol rehab; a&e; mental health services; especially mental health services for young people. But on the whole it it pretty good.

whatevsbro 13y ago
You may have noticed the Western world's economies swirling down the toilet, yes? Enjoy it while it lasts. But don't think it's going to "work" for ever.

MereInterest 13y ago

B is not at all a fair description. If a robber has a gun to my head, any transaction is far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise. If I were to have a terminal illness, any transaction would be far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise. A) Healthcare is negotiated by individuals, fearful for their lives, and with no other options. B) Healthcare is negotiated by bulk, by experts with the authority to set minimum standards of care. Which one will be better quality? Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" will starve to death if they can't drive to the closest grocery store 100 miles away. Are you motivated to: 1) provide permanent service that won't break down again, 2) avoid gouging customers, 3) maintain high standards? The obvious answers are: No, No, and No, and that's exactly what happens with everything that's run by any corporation, because it's always a contract between an amoral company and an individual responsibilities. It's rather unsurprising, then, that the USA's healthcare system is of poor quality, and that people can easily be driven into bankruptcy by medical costs.

whatevsbro 13y ago
> B is not at all a fair description. If a robber has a gun to my head, any transaction is far from voluntary, because there is a risk of death otherwise Option B was running healthcare as a business, with voluntary customers. You seem to be talking about something else.
jessaustin 13y ago
If a robber has a gun to my head... This is the third time I've heard this comparison on HN, and it still confuses me. It is probably true that people in poor health are very interested in receiving health care, but that does not equate to being forced to use a particular provider, or to accepting service under onerous terms. The point of running health care like a normal business is that if one physician is overcharging or underdelivering you can just go to a different one. Maybe whatevsbro's experience doesn't match your own, but you can't dismiss it so glibly, and in that experience, patients in a "universal" system don't have the option of choosing.

beat 13y ago

If your basis for arguing is cost, then you're not making a very good argument. The American system costs roughly twice what other civilized nations pay for health care per capita, and we have around 15% of the country not covered at all. Per capita cost is about 2.5 times that of Finland, and about twice that of Finland as a percentage of GDP. See charts here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how... The "choice" argument is also suspect, on a deep level. Americans are often trapped in jobs they hate, for fear of losing their health insurance if they quit or take another job. Worse, it hampers small businesses, that find it nearly impossible to provide insurance for their employees. Meanwhile, employees have little or no choice about the insurance plans they get. The current American system is an expensive, incompetent failure. The ACA was designed to try to fix some of the gross problems (lack of coverage for 15% of the population, mostly), but protect the core design of employer-provided private insurance. That's why the software failed. It's incredibly complex, and that complexity drives costs.

whatevsbro 13y ago
> If your basis for arguing is cost, then you're not making a very good argument. It's not. It's that any service that's run with money that's just confiscated from other people will be poor quality, because there's no motivation to provide good quality, because you don't actually have customers. You get to choose between an Android phone or an iPhone, for example. Imagine you were forced to only buy Android phones. Do you think they'd be good quality?
- beat 13y ago
  In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. You're talking theory (or more precisely, you're talking ideology). The observed data is that the American system is over twice as expensive as the average of comparable countries, and half again as expensive as its nearest competitors, while the results are little better and often worse. If your ideology of confiscation and motivation does not explain the observed facts, then your ideology is wrong, not the facts. That's what makes them facts.

fragmede 13y ago

> Suppose you're running a car repair shop, but your "customers" are just forced to come to you and pay for your services. Are you motivated to: 1) provide them with good service, 2) keep your costs low, 3) maintain high standards? Suppose this car repair shop is allowed to keep the true cost of your service a secret - what's an itemized receipt. Suppose it's not the car's owner that's paying for it, it's an insurance company, but instead of there being a free market of insurance companies, there's only a couple of them, and they're the ones building car repair shops. Suppose running a car repair shop is surrounded by untold layers of red tape, since if your car dies, you're not allowed to get another one, so few people are able start their own. Suppose your car has non-standard parts, and you can't simply buy a replacement OEM part that will work. Suppose your car came from the factory with several design problems it's simply impossible to permanently fix. Suppose car repair shops had a history of gouging people so badly that the gut-wrenching stories of people dying penniless from cancer caused people to call their congressman such that they demanded a change to the existing car-repair system... I could go on, but health care isn't car repair.

whatevsbro 13y ago
I'm well aware that the US healthcare system is utterly fucked, for the reasons you listed (and more). > I could go on, but health care isn't car repair. That's why it was an analogy.

Sambdala 13y ago

Prefacing this with that I'm about as Libertarian as they come, and I'm under no auspices that the US/anywhere has a free market in healthcare. edit: I also went from dirt-poor (and I'm assuming really horrible) health insurance plans in the US to having ridiculously good private insurance in the UK, so I'm already aware I'm entering into a supremely Apples v. Oranges scenario as is. I've lived in both the US and the UK (well, the Isle of Man; I've heard NHS is much more of a pain in the ass in the mainland UK), and I'm just shocked at how awful the customer service has always been in the US. In the US, I have never arrived at a doctor's appointment without waiting far past the time the appointment was scheduled to start and then waiting for the GP to actually come to the appointment room once you're seated there. In the UK (so far), I've seen the estimated time left before my appointment on an LED screen, and then both been led to the room on time and had the GP come in almost immediately. In every aspect of healthcare in the US, I've been shocked at how long you're just expected to wait for absolutely everything. Even if you arrive early, you sign in, wait in a room full of sick people for (on average IME) 40+ minutes past your appointment time, and then you wait an additional 15+ minutes for the GP to actually come into the room to begin the appointment. It actually makes me physically angry to think about how much time I've spent waiting in a doctor's room over the first 20-something years of my life. In your scenario B), I'd expect to be able to book an appointment online, arrive two minutes before it's scheduled to start, and walk out fifteen minutes later with whatever result you were looking for 99% of the time. To be fair, I've visited my general practitioner exactly twice since I've moved here, so I have no sample size; and as I previously stated, I live in an area that has a reputation for having much better healthcare than the mainland UK.

whatevsbro 13y ago
> Prefacing this with that I'm about as Libertarian as they come Sweet. Are you ready to take the next, and final step? They say that the difference between a Libertarian and an Anarchist is roughly six months (paraphrased). > In every aspect of healthcare in the US, I've been shocked at how long you're just expected to wait for absolutely everything. Yeah, it's completely fucked. Finland's system is similar in the waiting sense, at least. > In your scenario B), I'd expect to be able to book an appointment online, arrive two minutes before it's scheduled to start, and walk out fifteen minutes later with whatever result you were looking for 99% of the time. Exactly.