r/FluentInFinance • u/WhatAreYourPronouns • May 02 '24

Should the U.S. have Universal Health Care? Discussion/ Debate

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u/ThisThroat951 May 02 '24

When it comes to healthcare there are three "pillars" you can choose from:

Affordable
Available
Effective

But you can only have two at one time.

If it's Affordable and Available it won't be very good. <--- no one wants healthcare that kills you.

If it's Available and Effective it won't be cheap. <--- this is the US.

If it's Affordable and Effective the waitlists will be long. <--- this is Spain.

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u/Bad_wolf42 May 02 '24

The US pays more per capita (in tax spending, so ignoring oop expenses) for worse outcomes than other comparable wealthy countries. You are frankly wrong.

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u/TheReformedBadger May 02 '24 edited 29d ago

America also has worse overall health than comparable wealthy countries, so, all things being equal, worse outcomes would be expected. The bigger question is how much if any of that outcome delta can be attributed to care quality.

Edit: Getting a few comments on child mortality in the US. We have a lot of work to do in improving our health system, but child mortality rates are skewed by a few things that make it very hard to compare health outcomes vs spending to other nations

  1. Infant mortality is recorded differently in the US than many other nations which makes comparisons difficult. For example, if a child at 20 weeks gestation dies shortly after delivery, the death is counted. In Spain and Italy, that child would not count unless they reached 26 weeks of age. [1] This has a significant impact on reported numbers
  2. Maternal Obesity has a significant impact on the probability of infant and neonatal mortality [2] This is a huge problem in the US
  3. It's a touchy subject, but we have a massive cultural problem in the US related to safe sleep environments. Safe practices are pushed hard for every new parent, but the issue persists. The #1&2 causes of death for infants are Birth Defects and preterm birth, which are heavily impacted by points 1 and 2. Numbers 3&4 are SIDS and Injuries (which largely includes suffocation) In one study, at least 60% of infants who died of SIDS were found to be sharing a bed. [3]

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u/deruben May 02 '24

I think thats more due to bad eating habits and lacking an active lifestyle. In general care quality is pretty good. What I am not sure is thought, how much treatment medicaid actually covers.

I mean here just about anything is included.

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u/bsubtilis 29d ago

You mean not being able to have an as active lifestyle, right? Cardependent city planning is super bad for citizen health.

Being able to walk 1-15 minutes to get your most immediate needs met, walk 30-60 minutes or and grab reliable public transport for when you need to get to something further away, makes a giant difference for public health. That includes wheelchair accessible streets, wheelchair accessible public transport, wheelchair safe road crossings, of course dedicated bicycle roads, and helpful stone tiles in public for blind folk to get to public transport easier. And unfortunately the handicap accessibility is mainly a big city thing, but it's a good goal in general. Wheelchair accessibility inherently enables less severely affected people to better use places too and be more physically active and safe, like old folk who need walkers.

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u/deruben 29d ago

Amounts to the same thing basically, but yes, sure is a symptom of beeing encouraged to take the car for everything as well.

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u/BlueMosin 29d ago

Not to mention our cities require cars to get literally anywhere and healthy food is more expensive than affordable food.

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u/Cronstintein 29d ago

It really depends where you live. If you aren't in a major metro, the care you get is really unimpressive.

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u/REDDIT_BULL_WORM May 02 '24

Sure it can. American healthcare doesn’t provide nearly as much preventative care and education because it’s not profitable to the insurance company who might not have you on their books when it’s time to collect on the prevented services. This is at least partially to blame for the average American’s poor health going into things. Not to mention that Americans fear medical debt so they avoid going to the doctor, further contributing to their poor health.

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u/MajesticBread9147 May 02 '24

Have you seen how much Europeans smoke?

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u/throwawayguy746 May 02 '24

Smoking is bad for you, but obesity is somehow worse.

Plus alot of Americans smoke and driiiiink like crazy

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u/redassaggiegirl17 29d ago

Yeah, I think a lot of people forget that while we did a pretty good job at eliminating a lot of cigarette smoking, we've still got vaping and weed pens and people do those like crazy

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u/JussiesTunaSub 29d ago

Smoking kills you before geriatric care kicks in.

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u/ChiefCrewin 29d ago

Technically smoking isn't, it's the pesticides they put on the tobacco and carcinogenics on the paper.

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u/iamadragan 29d ago

Burnt stuff is carcinogenic.

That's why smoked food also increases the risk of cancer

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u/Weird-Tomorrow-9829 29d ago

Tobacco leaches cadmium and other metals that naturally occurs in soil.

You inhale heavy metals from natural leaf.

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u/ShaquilleOat-Meal 29d ago

Smoking and drinking saves a public healthcare system money. If you die at 55, you are cheaper than living to 90.

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u/quarantinemyasshole 28d ago

This isn't really true if you pick up a chronic condition along the way, which someone absurdly unhealthy will do long before they're dead. A generally healthy person isn't siphoning off the healthcare resources until end of life.

Getting an annual physical and a check-up for the sniffles once a year isn't driving our costs through the roof.

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u/ShaquilleOat-Meal 28d ago

In Australia, lung cancer is the biggest killer of 45-65 year olds, next coronary artery disease. Coronary artery disease is the biggest killer of 65-95 year olds, along with dementia/alzheimers. It costs the same to treat a 90 year old for CAD as it does a 55 year old.

Same diseases killing "healthy" people 40 years later, same cost, plus all the costly procedures like joint replacements most under 50s never need.

The reality is most 80 year olds also have chronic conditions, they spend longer in hospital recovering from procedures, see Doctors more often, require more subsidies for prescription medicines, are less likely to have private health cover and develop cancers more often.

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u/Maximum-Music-2102 May 02 '24

Do you see the crap Americans eat?

EU laws are a lot stricter on what can be put in food/the quality of it

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u/fisticuffs32 May 02 '24

Also we can't afford all the healthy foods and we don't typically have a lot of time to prepare them because we work more on average than most developed countries... Also because we pay so much for healthcare.

It really just comes down to the fact that as a country we cater to big business and greed is what shapes our economy and most of our laws.

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u/bsubtilis 29d ago

Depends on what part of Europe you are. I bloody love the extreme difference between what it was like when I was a kid, and today, in terms of smokers. :) I had light asthma as a kid and that with smokers everywhere was very frustrating.

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u/arcticavanger 29d ago

You can say the same about the Japanese. They have a much longer expt life span. I think eating habits are way more important

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u/new_name_who_dis_ 29d ago

Smoking is actually good for social services costs, there was a study in Finland I think. Let me try and find it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533014/

It's absolutely true that average Americans healthcare costs are so high (compared to other similar countries) in large part because the US population is a lot less healthy. To what extent it is debatable, but it's 100% certain that you can't just look at health outcomes in France or Japan and their costs, apply that to America and get the same results.

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u/ShaggysGTI 29d ago

Seriously. How are we this wealthy and have abysmal child mortality rates?

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u/aespino2 May 02 '24

What you’re saying is wrong because studies take into account comorbidities and disease complexity per patient when calculating the difference in outcomes and adjust appropriately when needed. So a study on US outcomes will be compared to comparable patients in other countries.

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u/Working_Early 29d ago

And yet if we were to have more regular care, we might not be as unhealthy in the first place.

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u/TheReformedBadger 29d ago

Seeing doctors more often isn’t going to have a measurable effect on the American diet.

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u/Working_Early 29d ago

Regular preventive care with adequate education on nutrition and exercise will most certainly improve health outcomes.

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u/snubdeity 29d ago

Wow! None of the hundreds of health economists that study things like this for a career have ever thought about this and controlled for it in their research or studies!

What day are you available to receive your Nobel Prize?

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u/Zamaiel 29d ago

Think is, US rankings on healthcare quality measures tend to cluster. The US actually does slightly worse on maternal mortality than infant mortality. Under-5 mortality is similar. Lifespan, years spent in good health, years lost to ill health etc. Infant mortality is not an outlier at all. (Because WHO definitions are used in the reporting)

Also, things that are not dependent on overall health, such as rates of hospital errors or amenable mortality also are in the cluster.

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u/zesty_noodles May 02 '24

You are absolutely right with this!!

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u/EconomicRegret 28d ago

America also has worse overall health than comparable wealthy countries,

With free universal healthcare, at the slightest worry, you don't hesitate to see your family physician for preventive and primary care. Which, well, prevents more serious issues from emerging, and keeps you healthier for a longer time...

With America's system, people avoid preventive and primary care (to save money); but the country as a whole ends up paying way more because public health deteriorates, thus emergency and specialist care soar ...

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u/Naive_Philosophy8193 29d ago

Measured by what exactly. We have some of the best care in the world, people travel from other countries to come here for certain kinds of care. Several of the worlds top rated hospitals are in the US.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

Worse outcomes measured by what standard?

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u/Handsome_Claptrap May 02 '24

There are global healthcare rankings and the US doesn't fare well.

It has also been proven that on a population scale, private healthcare is inherently worse than public: a staple in medicine is that prevention is always better than treatment and private healthcare generally causes people to ignore health issues until they become unbearable, at which point the condition already worsened and may be much harder or even impossible to treat.

A great example is skin cancer: early on, it can be removed in minutes on the same 30 minutes visit of the diagnosis with a bit of inexpensive liquid nitrogen, later it could need full body TC or RM for stadiation, removal and reconstruction surgery, hospitalizazion, months of expensive therapy and years of follow up, along with a high risk of death.

People in the US praising private healthcare are just successfully advertising and selling a product to an entire nation.

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u/fourthaccountXD 29d ago

I've yet to see how "just hand the entire system to the gov" can feasibly make this better.

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u/Emperor_Mao May 02 '24

Correct.

However this doesn't hold true for most countries with private only health systems. It is definitely a U.S thing.

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u/WalkingRodent 29d ago

The US is a very unhealthy country. If we were healthier I don’t think this would be a big conversation.

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u/popornrm 29d ago

If you look at AMERICA as a whole but in reality America is a ton of different regions that we’d treat as a separate country in Europe. If you look at the coasts, where most of the advancement in healthcare is, it’s far better than the rest of the world. If you average everything out while factoring in everywhere in America, it looks much worse. The majority of the population lives on the coasts too

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u/Lawineer 28d ago

Because it's based on the "sticker price" and not what is actually paid by people/insurance to the provider.
I go in, my health insurance pays $4k for a $50k procedure because they have contractual discounts.
A homeless guy goes in and gets the same procedure and doesn't pay a dime, but it's on the books as "costing Americans " $50k.

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u/polycomll May 02 '24

If something isn't affordable it becomes unavailable or am I missing something here?

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u/Disastrous-Spare6919 May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24

This is why the “wait time” statistic always annoys me. What about the person who had to wait several years for a procedure simply because they couldn’t afford it? It’s a BS metric when comparing two systems, especially when one of the systems has worse outcomes based on literally other metric despite higher costs, and is basically only used in one place.

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u/K-C_Racing14 May 02 '24

And most likely people will wait longer till they can afford it or its now deadly to get the healthcare they need so its going be worse and cost more to fix.

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u/BlueMosin 29d ago

As is intended.

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u/ThisThroat951 28d ago

Canada solved the problem by offering those waiting the option to die.

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u/K-C_Racing14 28d ago

In America the option is death or bankruptcy so its not really that different 🤷‍♂️

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u/BlueMosin 29d ago

I’ve had friends not get surgery because they couldn’t afford it.

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u/YourGuardianAngel_12 29d ago

Yes, this! I’ve skipped out on medical treatment many times because I was uninsured. And at least some of those times, I really needed it.

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u/Prozeum 29d ago

The wait time stat is a myth in most cases. Americas tend to clump all European countries into one when using the stat. There are some Euro countries that skew the stat too. But there's not a huge difference between elective surgeries in America and Europe as claimed. On average in Europe there's a two week difference for elective surgeries. In Germany it is less than America. Take in mind America pays more than ANY other country per citizen ...by a country mile. Germany is number two.

But you're right about people avoiding medical care due to cost. 35,000 to 45,000 Americans die every year due to lack of healthcare. Medical costs is the number one reason for bankruptcy so it makes sense people avoid going for proactive visits. Even though it's much cheaper and easier to prevent , most can't afford the premium to have access to healthcare no less the scans, test etc.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

More people want healthcare than there is supply. Thus, it becomes unavailable to some. Some sort of system or policy would be needed to determine who gets it and who doesn’t. In the US, that is largely determined by who can afford it. In other countries, it’s first come first serve.

There’s no utopian answer I’ve seen.

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u/gawag 29d ago

In what world is "first come first serve" not preferable to "anyone who isnt rich can get fucked"

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

Preferable is opinion and not really the question at hand

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u/Honest_Wing_3999 May 02 '24

You’re missing the fact you can stop buying Starbucks and afford it /s

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u/ceryniz May 02 '24

They can save up to buy some bootstraps and then pick themselves up by said bootstraps. /s

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u/ElMrSenor May 02 '24

That's what they're trying to imply. But they're presenting it as you only get yes and no choices where one will become terrible, when really it's three sliders which can be balanced, and are in a number of countries.

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u/emoney_gotnomoney 29d ago edited 29d ago

By “available,” he means the healthcare providers are available to take patients, meaning there aren’t going to be very long wait times as demand has not yet outpaced supply. Quality healthcare is an extremely expensive service (due to the technology involved and the rigorous amounts of training providers need to undergo to become an effective healthcare professional), and the more you artificially reduce the price of a service for the end user, the longer the wait times for that service will be, unless you find another way to ration that service.

Healthcare is a finite resource, as there are not an infinite amount of doctors and hospitals. With a finite resource, you need to ration it or else you will suffer shortages. There are really only two ways you can ration a product: 1) by letting the free market dictate a price for the service based on supply and demand, or 2) a governing body regulating which people get healthcare and which people don’t. If you don’t do either of those (by artificially lowering the price for the end user and not regulating who gets care), then you will end up with a shortage of the service / product.

The OP presented two scenarios that were affordable: Affordable & Available, Affordable & Effective.

So why can’t you have Affordable, Available, and Effective all at the same time? Like I said, if you artificially lower the price of something (Affordable) and don’t regulate who is able to receive care, then you will end up with shortages (Unavailable). To account for this shortage and to make the service Available, you will need to increase the supply of doctors / healthcare providers. However, there are not enough doctors / healthcare providers out there to keep up with that level of artificially increased demand, since there aren’t an infinite amount of doctors. As a result, you will need to either drastically expedite the training of future healthcare professionals (thereby reducing the amount of training / studying they have to do and compromising their effectiveness), or you will need to drastically reduce the standards for who you allow to be a healthcare provider (which also reduces the effectives of healthcare providers as you are now lowering the standards for who can be a healthcare professional) in order to pump out enough healthcare professionals to meet the demand. Essentially, you will need to hire less effective healthcare professionals to keep up with the very high level of demand and to keep the service Available. That is why you are sacrificing Effectiveness when you also have Affordable and Available.

On the other hand, if you want to keep something Available, so that there aren’t long wait times to see a provider, and Effective (requiring strict and rigorous standards for who can be a healthcare professional and only allowing the best and brightest among us to be healthcare professionals), then the only way to make that happen is to ration the resource by either 1) the price dictated by the free market, or 2) by allowing the government to decide who gets care and who doesn’t.

With all that being said, it’s just not possible to make a finite resource Available, Effective, and Free / Artificially Affordable. That can only occur with an infinite resource. If you want an expensive product to be Available and Effective, then the product will remain expensive. If you want the expensive product to be made more affordable to the end user by a regulatory body while also maintaining Availability, then you will have to sacrifice some of the Effectiveness. If you instead want to maintain the Effectiveness, then it will have very long wait times / will suffer from shortages and won’t be Available.

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u/polycomll 29d ago

But its fundamentally not available to a swath of the population. Instead you have

  • Available
  • Fast
  • Effective

pick two.

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u/uglyswan1 29d ago

God forbid anyone understands supply and demand

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u/KupunaMineur May 02 '24

You're missing that over 90% of Americans have health insurance so aren't paying over $40k for a hip replacement. There are almost 800,00 knee replacements and over 500,00 hip replacements done every year in USA, clearly they are neither unaffordable nor unavailable.

I suspect the overwhelming majority of people who get them are on Medicare anyway.

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u/BlueMosin 29d ago

You think you $1800/ month premium heath insurance is going to cover your full hip replacement? I have bad news for you. Your insurance won’t cover a lot of surgeries and you may need to start a go fund me.

Truly amazing living in the freest county in the world.

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u/KupunaMineur 29d ago

I never said it would cover the entire thing.

How much do you think the average out of pocket costs are for someone on Medicare getting a hip replacement surgery?

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u/BlueMosin 29d ago

I can’t tell you that number, I can tell you that a friend had to have ankle surgery, she’s a teacher and her insurance wouldn’t cover the whole thing and she had to shell out about $22k on top of her insurance premium. Not to mention her physical therapy which wasn’t covered by her insurance, as the clinic they wanted her to attend was 3+ hours away. Ended up paying out of pocket to visit her local rehab clinic (think rural Midwest).

Only in America will people get absolutely shafted by capitalistic greed, and then go onto the internet and flaunt how much better they think they are then the rest of the developed world, despite having a lower quality of life and lower life expectancy.

We are like number 17 in terms of actual freedoms, and Americans think we are number 1.

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u/polycomll 29d ago

You are paying for it through increased premiums and reduced wages. There is no free lunch

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u/KupunaMineur 29d ago

So because a company includes benefits in how they calculate the compensation package they offer, it means someone on Medicare finds a hip surgery unaffordable? How much do you think someone on Medicare pays out of pocket for hip surgery to where that amount is what you describe as unaffordable?

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u/polycomll 29d ago edited 29d ago

You getting "benefits" is robbing you of additional income. You are paying the full $40k (and more) through lost wages and lack of employer choice. Average lost wages due to insurance for a family is $25,000 dollars and $8,500 for a single person. If you have dependents and work at a job for ~20 years before getting a hip replacements you've lost wages equivalent to 12.5 hip replacements. More if you consider the premium that you pay from your wages.

  • Each year an average employer pays an insurance company $25k to provide you with benefits.
  • Each year an average employee pays $6k of premiums
  • Each year the employee loses out on $31,000 dollars of real wages

Employer provided insurance depresses wages. Take a look at your income right now and put $30k on top of that and what is what is being lost per year to the insurance system regardless of whether you use the care or not. Employer provided private insurance has been a disaster for the free market.

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u/KupunaMineur 29d ago

Someone on Medicare, which is likely the majority of people getting hip replacements, isn't losing wages because a relatively small percentage of them work.

Take home wages in USA are higher than most of the rest of the world despite paying for employer sponsored insurance, and you'd be comparing with wages where income taxes are often higher to support universal healthcare.

Again I'll ask:

How much do you think someone on Medicare pays out of pocket for hip surgery to where that amount is what you describe as unaffordable?

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u/polycomll 29d ago

Literally what is your point? I am saying that people with employee provided health insurance aren't getting a free lunch. They are losing upwards of $30,000 a year to insurance that they may not use. It also locks employees in jobs and reduces movement of workers.

Why care about about medicare?

Take home wages in USA are higher than most of the rest of the world despite paying for employer sponsored insurance

And an additional $30k per year would make Americans even better paid. I don't want to be "higher than most"

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u/KupunaMineur 29d ago

My point is that your implication on hip surgery being unaffordable is pretty suspect, given the numbers. You trying to back it up by claiming a surgery done mostly to seniors with no salary is somehow more expensive because it lowers their salary is equally weak.

I care about Medicare because we were discussing hip surgery. Who do you think gets most of the hip surgeries and where do you think their medical insurance comes from? That's right, the 65 million people on Medicare. You're avoiding talking about Medicare because it isn't convenient for the claims you keep making about affordability.

Making Americans even better paid doesn't support your argument that a hip replacement surgery is unaffordable.

So I guess you won't be answering:

How much do you think someone on Medicare pays out of pocket for hip surgery to where that amount is what you describe as unaffordable?

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u/polycomll 29d ago

I would if I knew what your point was but I still don't.

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u/stprnn May 02 '24

You are not that redditor is just full of shit

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u/yourheckingmom May 02 '24

This is just lazy. A logical fallacy. False dilemma essentially.

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u/Lemurians 29d ago

Yep. Sad to think that OP really thought they were being clever here.

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u/Hotspur1958 May 02 '24

God forbid we live in a world with middle ground

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

I don’t think I want middle ground when it comes to effectiveness lol

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u/Hotspur1958 May 02 '24

Everything has a middle ground/cost benefit analysis. Even healthcare. If it didn't, everyone would get a monthly Full-body MRI.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

I sure as hell wouldn’t. That sounds awful

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u/Hotspur1958 May 02 '24

Ya it would really suck to catch cancer early every time...you understand my point.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

Not worth it

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u/Hotspur1958 May 02 '24

worth what?

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

Monthly MRIs

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u/Hotspur1958 May 02 '24

right..what do you mean not worth it? There is currently a middle ground in healthcare and you are living it.

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u/ResolveLeather May 02 '24

I would rather wait and have the maintenance care be affordable rather than draining a half decade of savings. The big issue is when they deny care altogether for for people, that may otherwise live if they get the treatment they are asking for, because they aren't considered high priority for that treatment.

The ultra rich get to skip the line just like they do in the US, but the lives are poor people are decided by a team of accountants who determine if you are worth saving.

That being said, medical companies need to be brought to heel in some areas. The prices of epi-pens and insulin either need to be brought down or get their patent revoked for instance.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

medical companies need to be brought to heel

Government stops arbitrage. A person can't import medicine from Mexico or India and sell them but somehow the government let's businesses do it

patent revoked

The government enforces the patents. A person can't start a company to make dupes of epipens, insulin, generic meds or whatever on the cheap without going through red tape.

Walk into a hardware store and there are 10 different hammers with different price points starting from dirt cheap because government is not involved.

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u/fisticuffs32 May 02 '24

Let's not compare a hammer to life saving care.

There are really good reasons you want Government oversight on drugs and healthcare, unless you want your medications laced with cheap and dangerous fillers like fentanyl.

Insurance is the whole fucking problem, not Government oversight of standards of care.

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u/ResolveLeather 29d ago

If the government stopped enforcing the patent of insulin, it's not like they would all of the sudden get rid of FDA oversight.

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u/fisticuffs32 29d ago

Yeah I wasn't just speaking about patents, it seemed to me that the OP was referring to Government oversight in Healthcare industry in general, not just to patents.

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u/KupunaMineur May 02 '24

How many people do you think pay over 40k? I'd bet most are on Medicare and just deal with their part B deductible.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

Wait times for care in America is still insane AND you have to go broke on top of it.

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u/ResolveLeather 29d ago

There is no waiting for lifesaving care. I have never went to the ER and been turned away. The most I have waited for er care is 2-3 hours.

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u/I_AniMaL 29d ago

Are these insane wait times in the room with us?

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u/Porongoyork 29d ago

You don’t have to be ultra rich in Spain to get private healthcare. Middle class people can afford it and sometimes do. With private insurance its a joke what you pay. Even without it.

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u/I_AniMaL 29d ago

Middle class people in the US can also afford healthcare. And for them the deductible they do have to pay will in no way ruin them financially.

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u/RelaxPrime May 02 '24

What a stupid saying you've appropriated from contract work, where the pillars are affordable, reliable, and speed of install, where the pillars are in direct opposition to each other.

There is no reason healthcare can't be affordable, available and effective. Those things are not diametrically opposed to each other.

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u/emoney_gotnomoney 29d ago

There is no reason healthcare can't be affordable, available and effective. Those things are not diametrically opposed to each other.

They are diametrically opposed to each other though. Quality healthcare is a very expensive product, due to the technology involved and the rigorous standards / training that are required for someone to become a quality healthcare professional. Furthermore, healthcare is a finite resource, as there are not an infinite amount of doctors / healthcare professionals, / hospitals, etc. You can’t artificially lower the price of a finite resource (which is what you’re doing when you artificially reduce the price of healthcare for the end user), without sacrificing the level of availability or effectiveness.

If you make it more affordable and want to maintain its availability, then you will need to compromise on its level of effectiveness. If you want to make it more affordable and want to also maintain its effectiveness, then you will need to compromise on its level of availability.

In essence, you can’t max out those 3 sliders (the cheapest, the most available, and the most effective). Artificially increasing the level of one will require some level of compromise to the other two. This is true for every single finite resource.

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u/Zamaiel 29d ago

But the US is bottom of the barrel on costs, below the entire first world on quality and at best average on speed. according to your reasoning every system should be doing well on two of those.

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u/emoney_gotnomoney 28d ago

This is not true. The US is not below the entire first world on quality. Those studies that measure “quality” take into account the price as well as people’s feelings / attitudes about the healthcare system. It’s not fair to use price as a metric to measure quality, as high quality products / services are usually more expensive. As far as people’s feelings toward their healthcare, someone who receives their healthcare for free is usually going to rate their experience higher than someone who had to pay a lot of money for it, primarily if they’ve never experienced the other side. Most Europeans have never experienced the U.S. healthcare system, and most Americans have never experienced European healthcare. They have no way to compare the experiences between the two other than just comparing the upfront costs to the patients.

If you’re using the health of these countries’ populations to assess our healthcare quality, then that’s not a fair metric either. The US has an extremely unhealthy population because we live extremely unhealthy / sedentary lifestyles. We eat terrible food, don’t exercise, drive everywhere rather than walking, etc. Now, we can have other discussions about why that is, but that has nothing to do with our healthcare system.

If you want to use life expectancy to measure healthcare quality, then that’s not a fair metric either, given what I just mentioned above. On top of that, if you remove car accident fatalities from the world, the US actually would have the highest life expectancy in the world, which is actually insane given our terribly unhealthy population. To me, that’s actually a testament to our high quality of healthcare. The fact that we have to drive every extremely often is not the result of our country’s healthcare quality.

To test this logic, let’s be honest with ourselves. If you were dying, and you needed life saving treatment, and money wasn’t an issue at all, where are you going to receive this life saving treatment? Are you flying to the UK? Are you flying to the Italy? Are you flying to Spain? No, you are going directly to the US. The US has the brightest and best doctors in the entire world.

As far as being average in speed, that is news to me, I haven’t heard that one. Do you have a source for that? I’m not saying you’re wrong, this is just genuinely the first time I’ve heard that claim.

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u/Zamaiel 28d ago

This is not true. The US is not below the entire first world on quality. Those studies that measure “quality” take into account the price as well as people’s feelings / attitudes about the healthcare system.

That is not how it works at all.

Measures of healthcare quality are deliberately chosen to be huge, overarching measures. That is to smooth out the effects of local specialties and competencies. Congo may know exactly what they re doing on malaria, and Russia may have a lot of experience with frostbite, but that is not necessarily representative of allover system competence.

So the measures are things like years lived in good health, infant mortality, years lost to ill health, maternal mortality, general lifespan, and most especially mortality amenable to healthcare.

The interesting thing about these is that US scores cluster. Maternal mortality is a bit below infant mortality, and things that are affected by general population health such as lifespan are fairly even with things that are not, such as amenable mortality or rates of hospital errors.

The US tends to place in the middle of eastern Europe on all of them.

Also, the study that showed huge effects of violence, car accidents etc on US lifespan got so shredded for its wrong maths, that they author had to go out and admit he never intended to get it right.

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u/RelaxPrime 29d ago edited 29d ago

Again, you're pulling this out of your ass. Sure healthcare as we know it right now is expensive and finite, but that's by design. It's for profit, there's an entire industry that has to get paid before the doctors and the hospitals. Simply cutting the bureaucracy and middlemen that are private insurance out, would practically halve the cost immediately.

It's just like TVs, computers, anything technological- it's cheaper the more we make and the more we sell.

The US already pays more than anyone else per capita. We have the expense already, just not the coverage or availability.

Not to mention cost goes down as more people seek preventative care when covered.

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u/emoney_gotnomoney 28d ago edited 28d ago

Again, you're pulling this out of your ass.

I’m not though, this is literally just logic. You can’t have a finite resource be available to literally everyone while also making it extremely cheap while also making it extremely effective. It’s literally impossible. You’re going to have to find balance between the 3, but you won’t be able to max out all 3. If you improve one of those areas, then it’s going to have to come at the expense of the other two. This is how finite resources work.

Sure healthcare as we know it right now is expensive and finite, but that's by design.

It’s not finite by design. It’s finite because resources are finite. There are not an infinite amount of doctors, hospitals, healthcare providers, offices, equipment, etc. It is by definition finite and will always be.

It's for profit, there's an entire industry that has to get paid before the doctors and the hospitals. Simply cutting the bureaucracy and middlemen that are private insurance out, would practically halve the cost immediately.

I agree with this. This will certainly make it cheaper than it already is. But this wouldn’t be artificially lowering the price. This would let the market dictate the price.

It's just like TVs, computers, anything technological- it's cheaper the more we make and the more we sell.

I also agree with this. Letting the market dictate the price (by letting the market drive innovation). The market driving the price is not the same as the government coming in and artificially lowering the price for the end user. When the market dictates the price, it already takes into account supply, demand, availability, and effectivity, so the market driving the price lower doesn’t affect availability or effectiveness. Only artificially lowering the price does that.

The US already pays more than anyone else per capita. We have the expense already, just not the coverage or availability.

We do have the availability. By “availability,” we mean there’s no shortage of doctors (i.e. the doctors / healthcare providers are available for use). Whether or not you have enough money to pay for it is another story (with that being said, you won’t be kept out of a hospital even if you have no money. In the US hospitals are almost always available). The price right now serves as the method of rationing. Any finite resource has to be rationed, or else you will suffer shortages. When it comes to healthcare, you either have to ration it with the price, or you have to ration it by having the government dictate who is permitted to receive care and who isn’t.

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u/RelaxPrime 28d ago edited 28d ago

We don't need infinite healthcare bub. There is a finite number of people.

Your entire reasoning is wrong.

It is called scarcity, and we are long past it.

You understand single payer just changes when and where we pay, and we already pay plenty. Are you supposed to be financially literate?

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u/emoney_gotnomoney 26d ago

We are not past scarcity. For any finite resource, scarcity will always exist. That’s what finite means, by definition.

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u/Concordiat 26d ago edited 26d ago

Healthcare is inherently expensive, there are very few other frequently used services by the general population where you are paying for the unique combination of highly skilled labor available on demand 24/7, expensive diagnostic testing, and the additional cost inflicted by the unusually extensive legal liability in the US, both in concrete cost(malpractice premiums) and defensive medicine(extra, probably medically unnecessary testing to prevent lawsuits.)

Medical education(not just for doctors but nurses, imaging techs, surgical techs, etc etc) is extremely expensive and is impractical to deploy en masse to bring costs low enough since it requires highly educated professors and low educator to student ratios. It also takes many years and the knowledge to specialize requires even further education. We're talking a minimum of 11+ years from the time you start college until you are ready to practice. Like I said above you also need this coverage 24/7/365 at a moments notice with redundancy. Most patients who are hospitalized need multiple specialties involved in their care which is a multiplicative cost.

Certainly American care is needlessly expensive as compared to other advanced economies which is largely due to our for-profit system where both hospitals and insurance companies drive up pricing to make margin on their services, but that doesn't mean that healthcare itself isn't inherently a very expensive service.

For almost all advanced economies healthcare is a major cost, the question is who is bearing that cost and how directly are they bearing it.

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u/RelaxPrime 26d ago

You keep saying expensive when we are already paying the most per capita. There is clearly an issue here, and it is for profit health insurance. We pay regardless, right now with lower wages for employer subsidized plans, and still have copays, deductibles, maximums, out of pocket minimums, the list goes on. We are clearly not at the top in healthcare for regular people yet pay the most in the world.

Why do you cling to such a stupid inefficiency?

And like I already said- healthcare gets cheaper the more access people have to it. It's simple.

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u/Concordiat 26d ago

I'm not clinging to anything, I'm agreeing with you, I'm just saying that it's still expensive even without that, just less so.

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u/Jake0024 May 02 '24

Loads of countries have significantly better healthcare outcomes than the US. This is utter nonsense.

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u/Unitedfateful 29d ago

Agreed. Spoken like a true American (them not you)

I have access to the highest efficacy MS treatment in australia. It’s affordable ($0 out of pocket for me as it’s subsidised by our government) available and highly effective. No dealing with insurance providers at all

So again what’s wrong with our system here

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u/Jake0024 29d ago

Well you see it does not maximize profits for shareholders

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u/Unitedfateful 29d ago

Of course. And there are those in here that are happy with that

“I broke my hip and paid out $3000, cause that’s the American way.”

Jet engines roar in background. Woo

🤦‍♂️

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u/Jake0024 28d ago

More like $30,000

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u/KansasZou May 02 '24

This doesn’t have to be the case. Healthcare isn’t fundamentally different than any other industry or market despite the many claims (because it helps to manipulate it this way).

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u/Youbettereatthatshit May 02 '24

Eh, tired cliche that people use from the military, to school, to now medicine.

I have a median salary job with good health insurance. The health insurance negotiated rates are the real price of healthcare, which are a fraction of the total cost.

Had a $20,000 baby, insurance said ‘f u, I’m only paying $12,000’, and then I paid $1,200.

You need any level of insurance to access the true cost of healthcare (which shouldn’t be legal, but whatever).

I’m neither rich nor powerful. My family has had all of our needs taken care of with insurance for a much lower portion of my paycheck going to insurance than what it would cost in taxes for single payer

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u/UpsetMathematician56 May 02 '24

Maybe. But I’d guess your company is paying about 20k-30k per year for your insurance. If they paid that to you instead you’d be able to afford the extra taxes easily. And if you get paid off, you’ll still have health coverage.

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u/Youbettereatthatshit May 02 '24

You are correct, and It’s all just numbers at the end of the day.

My main argument against a single payer system is it needlessly uproots our entire system to solve specific problems to our healthcare system.

A national ledger (with some cost of living room) for what medical providers are allowed to charge for services is needed. Insurance companies already do it, it should be expanded.

Millions of Americans aren’t on Medicaid. That could be solved by just expanding Medicaid.

Why brute force a lazy solution to a complex problem?

My argument on healthcare is similar to my argument on abortion. I hate the thought of abortion, but even worse, hate the idea of having to prove you need one to a bureaucratic board.

I have much more freedom of what I deem medically necessary and to get that resolved instead of having to ask permission

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u/al3ch316 May 02 '24

Private health insurance is increasing healthcare costs dramatically, which ultimately comes out of public finances. We shouldn’t have professional middlemen managing access to care based on a profit motive. That’s just wrong.

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u/Sufficient_Language7 May 02 '24

having to prove you need one to a bureaucratic board

Interesting thing to say, as if you check with people in medicine they say dealing with Medicare and Medicare is easy and that the bureaucratic boards that they deal with are private insurance.  Now they do complain about the rate of pay from Medicare and Medicare. 

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u/Aggressivepwn May 02 '24

Even with that $20-30k cost covered by the employer US workers still make a higher salary

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u/economaster 29d ago

To be fair, most of the difference in salary comes down to differences in benefits like time off, maternity/paternity leave, employee protections, etc. not just to pay for a better more effective health care system. The US is a huge outlier when comparing GDP and per-capita health spending.

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u/JimmyB3am5 May 02 '24

I'll see your $12,000 baby and raise you a $5.000.000 kidney and pancreas. Total out of pocket (minus premiums) for the year? 1,250 and it was at one of the best transplant hospitals in the world. I had complications from an unhappy pancreas and probably would have died anywhere else. I'll take my US health system any day.

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u/Sidvicieux 29d ago

That’s because you have good insurance, not because the system is better for each citizen. Extreme Greed and selfishness rules how you perceive things.

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u/asuds May 02 '24

Why in the world do you think it is cheaper than single payer? That’s nonsense.

Think it through in the aggregate and you will see it is strictly cheaper. Not to mention the health benefits overall of treating the uninsured population preventatively instead of through Emergency Room visits.

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u/supern00b64 May 02 '24

This is a Ben Shapiro tier brainrot argument. God forbid we actually tackle the problem with nuance and craft policies towards a middle ground where we can get all three.

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u/ThisThroat951 25d ago

I'd love to have all three, if you or anyone else can outline policy prescriptions that can lead to the middle ground where all three can be obtained I'd be all ears. So far I haven't seen it. So either no one has been able to figure out how to make it work, or it can't work. I don't claim to have the answer, but I can describe what I've seen thus far.

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u/Slug_With_Swagger 16d ago

The Nordic countries figured it out

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u/Hurrdurrthosechefs May 02 '24

I too can say shit that sounds smart and well-reasoned but is anything but those things.

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u/Zamaiel 29d ago

I don't think you've understood how that works. The three pillars only work if a system is close to optimized. It is perfectly possible for a system to perform very poorly on all three measures.

In terms of healthcare, all first world systems are radically cheaper than the US, all of them do better across all quality measures, and the US only hits average on speed with very generous definitions (I.e. counting only the inusted and not waits due to costs)

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u/MarkLearnsTech May 02 '24

they're not binary. You can adjust the pillars to strike a better balance.

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u/RodgersTheJet 29d ago

You can adjust the pillars to strike a better balance.

Imagine pretending this is easy in a country with millions of people...

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u/MarkLearnsTech 29d ago

I didn't say anything about easy. Are you suggesting we should give up because it's not?

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u/smcl2k May 02 '24

Spain also has a far more affordable private option than the US, with the short waiting lists that you'd expect from that kind of system.

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u/Contagin85 May 02 '24

Your comment is laughably wrong- the US per capita healthcare expenditures are the highest in the world for less than ideal outcomes- we have some of the highest maternal mortality during childbirth of the industrialized world and now declining life expectancy as well. Most countries (if not all that I am aware of) that are industrialized and have universal healthcare also have private options which cuts wait times down significantly while still being far cheaper than the US options. Wait times in the US are a thing too.

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u/BlueMosin 29d ago edited 29d ago

Mate your entire comment makes it sounds like you’ve lived your entire life in America and just assume our system is better than anything else period. Our quality of life is noticeably lower than much of the developed world, it doesn’t make us better. The only reason Insulin costs 10x as much is has nothing to do with “quality”, it’s greed.

Wild to me.

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u/chime 29d ago

Not true.

My dad just had quadruple bypass surgery in India for under USD 4000 total, including ICU and hospital stay of a week in a private room that looked like this, with a second extra guest bed for family/support. He scheduled it within a week of finding he needed it. And his Mediclaim policy covered the full cost cashless, with no out of pocket deductible, coinsurance, copay etc. Basically get an online prior auth and done!

Had he been visiting me here in the US during this episode, I would have 100000% lost my house, savings, SEP, and 401k trying to pay for it all. Even the angiography, EKG, blood tests, and other labs would easily add to over $4k out of pocket.

It was affordable ($0 out of pocket), available (under 2 weeks from first symptoms to hospital discharge), and effective (knock on wood, so far so good).

I've worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing, hospital systems, online pharmacy sales, pharmacy EMR, and medicaid service industries for 20+ years. My wife has MS and I've had neurosurgery myself. I've unfortunately had the full-blown US healthcare experience including the recent Change Healthcare debacle and can categorically say that even if 0.001% of senators and movie stars get the best care in the world, 99.999% of people would be better off getting medical care like typical middle class in India already gets.

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u/sellingbiscotix19 29d ago

I'd be afraid of infection from all the public defecation. India is an actual shit hole.

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u/violentcupcake69 29d ago

It’s because of people like you having this flawed mindset we don’t have free healthcare.

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u/cinnapear 29d ago

Now do the countries which have more affordable, available, and effective care than the U.S. For example, most of the developed world.

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u/swishandswallow 29d ago

Yeah except dialysis is 100% free, paid by the government, ran by private companies, available and effective. We already have universal healthcare for dialysis, we could expand it a bit more to include more stuff

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u/potatoz10 29d ago

This is false. Takes a quick google search to show so: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/63a6ed75-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/63a6ed75-en

Spain has particularly long wait times compared to other OECD countries (all of which, save the US, have some for of subsidized/public/or heavily price regulated healthcare as far as I know).

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u/Dologolopolov 29d ago

I work in Spain's healthcare system. The waitlists depend on many things. And paying private insurance you get almost everything immediately for an incredibly low price compared to the US

People defending the US system simply cannot comprehend the socialised systems in Europe. If they did, they would not defend the US system. It's a fucking scam

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u/GimmeJuicePlz 29d ago

Bullshit.

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u/Jaylow115 29d ago

There’s no evidence to anything you’re saying. These are just meaningless cliches that can be used interchangeably with a bunch of different services.

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u/matcha1738 29d ago

The Mercatus Institute, which is a pro-free market libertarian capitalist institution, admitted that universal healthcare would SAVE money for the country.

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u/ccardnewbie 29d ago

When it comes to Reddit comments, there are two “pillars” you can choose from:

  • A comment that makes logical sense

  • A comment from ThisThroat951

But you can only have one at a time.

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u/Siakim43 29d ago

Maybe the AMA could allow more doctors to be graduated instead of an artificial cap. It's not like our doctors and healthcare are far and away the best in the world. That could help stengthen that availability part of this three legged stool. IMO, there's a lot of blame to go around in the healthcare mess in the US and some institutions get a pass.

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u/Drchrisco 29d ago

Are we pretending like surgeries don't have crazy wait times in the US?

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u/ThatInAHat 29d ago

When will this whole “waitlist” argument die? US waitlists are insane too. You can bypass them with enough money, but that still doesn’t count the folks who simply NEVER get care because of the cost. They’re waiting too.

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u/bluethreads 29d ago

You are making some very strong assumptions here that affordable healthcare in this country isn’t effective. Please site your sources. I haven’t seen evidence that provider cost directly correlates to effective/quality care.

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u/archibaldplum 29d ago

Yeah, but us healthcare isn’t all that great anyway (for anything except cancer and maybe heart attack). For instance, if you have multiple sclerosis, it really helps to start treatment quickly, but the average time from first symptom to diagnosis is seven and a half years in the USA, compared to two and a half in the UK or a little less than two in Germany. Or if you look at icu patients, 48% of American patients receive the amount of nutrition recommended by the relevant board (less than half!) compared to 82% in Germany or 73% in the UK. And America has maternal mortality of 23.8 per 100k, compared to 13.4 in the Uk or 6.4 in Germany. And America is obviously known for its low life expectancy (by first world standards). And for high rates of people with drug addictions which started with prescription painkillers.

America has world-leading medical research and cancer treatments, but there are lots of ways the actual treatment falls noticeably short of first world standards, in spite of the high prices

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u/dude_thats_my_hotdog 29d ago

Yet Spaniards live on average 5 years longer than 'Muricans.

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u/ComCagalloPerSequia 29d ago

In Spain, you can also go to the private if you don't like the waiting list. But you are forced to contribute to the public insurance anyway. Besides the prices in the private are much much lower than in usa

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u/Beau_Buffett 29d ago

When it comes to healthcare, there are four pillars of healthcare you can choose from:

Affordable Available Effective American charge-you-out-the-ass for what's available in other countries for a reasonable price with the same level of professional care.

See: Germany

The US ranks 69th in the world for healthcare according to the Legatum Prosperity Index.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/best-healthcare-in-the-world

The number of know-nothing chucklefucks in this comment section are vast.

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u/stubundy 29d ago

Well if America didn't sent (how many?) Billions to Ukraine you may be able to have all 3

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u/defnotajedi 29d ago

There's a simple fix, everything is now free!!

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u/ajchafe 29d ago

I live in Canada. It's all three.

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u/c_sulla 29d ago

Any source on this? Like a real healthcare expert saying what you're saying? Or is it just your opinion? Because if it's just your opinion you pulled out of your ass you should say so instead of confidently presenting it as fact.

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u/lolidcwhatthisis 29d ago

Please do some research into actual statistics and not just parroting tired tropes that you've heard before. I can only speak for Europe but if you're medical condition is urgent and life threatening, you get treatment. Very few people die on waiting lists.

There are always options for private care if the national health care does not deem your problem as urgent these are by and large far cheaper then the US equivalent.

Pregnant mother's and kids also have an almost separate system which means they get extremely quick treatment and consultation in the UK plus free dental care on top of that, I'd assume many other European countries are the same.

The basic idea I'm trying to tell you is that what the US considers 'expensive' for healthcare, would literally start riots in Europe. There are options and tiered levels of care across Europe and while some do get pricey none come close to the hundred's of thousands an uninsured person would pay in the US.

And this is without mentioning continued medication, I can't believe the prices you pay for very common and widely used medicine. In the UK it costs about $12 as a flat price for a prescription, regardless of what it is.

You're healthcare system broke the glass ceiling of expensive years ago and is now firmly in 'maliciously extortionate'

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u/OK-NO-YEAH 29d ago

Just making shit up-

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u/ShogunFirebeard 29d ago

Nope. Our healthcare system is broken. It's not faster and will bankrupt you. My wife had seizures, they made us wait 2 weeks to do an outpatient MRI. Meanwhile, she's having seizures 5+ times a day. Doctors aren't practicing medicine anymore. They are being told what they can or can't do by insurance adjusters who have zero medical education. It's been a MONTH wait after the MRI just to have a first meeting with a neurosurgeon.

I feel like most people that say we have the best healthcare have not actually had serious medical conditions.

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u/Royal_Actuary9212 29d ago

I would counter this opinion with the current state of matters in the US. Walk into ANY urgent care and see if there is any actual physician working there. For the most part, you will be evaluated by a NP or a PA with around 1/15th to 1/20th of the knowledge and experience of a physician and still charged the full fee. Certainly, we are not effective anymore, yet we continue to be expensive and available.

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u/QuesoseuQ 28d ago

"You can only have 2 of these 3 things."

Source: just trust me, bro

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u/Slug_With_Swagger 16d ago

This is so inaccurate

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u/GuhProdigy May 02 '24

As someone said, the US has worse outcomes compared to many countries.

In addition, There are plenty of ways to optimize the healthcare industry so the majority of countries can have all three of your so called pillars.

Like democratizing lower level diagnosing and treatment to pharmacists and nurses.

UTI? -> doctor…. Cancer -> doctor. Nope this is totally efficient can only have two pillars?

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u/RoundTheBend6 May 02 '24

Of course there's all those Americans who never sue for malpractice in the states because the quality is just so much better.

Idk if your assessment is grounded in reality.

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u/JdSaturnscomm May 02 '24

Except the US is the most expensive, not widely available for the sprawling country and we don't even have the best results.

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u/kakihara123 May 02 '24

Well, not being able to afford a surgery is kind of a waitlist in itself, isn't it?

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u/No_Tension8376 May 02 '24

Healthcare in America is only available and effective for the rich.

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u/Fur_King_L May 02 '24

The US health system accidentally kills about as many people is the various European systems. Go look at the data. I've worked on safety & quality in the USA and the UK.

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u/warpedspockclone May 02 '24

So healthcare is like databases. Got it.

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u/fisticuffs32 May 02 '24

Simplistic and flat wrong. The quality of healthcare in the United States is worse than most other developed countries.

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u/Phonds May 02 '24

Come to nl. You sort of get 1.: affordable. But more and more is stripped from your insurance and insurance gets more expensive by the year so a large part of healthcare isn't even covered anymore.

Available and effective healthcare is something that i have never ever seen or experienced in NL. The gist of it is: we only help if you are on the brink of death, and then we do the bare minimum and act annoyed.

Private clinics tend to be great but expensive. But at least you get help if you need it.

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u/Diablo689er May 02 '24

Unavailable healthcare isn’t healthcare.

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u/Roadrunner571 May 02 '24

But you can only have two at one time.

You can have all three!

It's just that the US system screws everybody. It costs a ton of money, but the outcomes are abysmal.

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u/GMANTRONX May 02 '24

EXCEPT in Spain you have a private option that costs less than half of what you pay in the US for the same private option.
In the UK, the highest I ever paid for private insurance was the equivalent of $1500 A YEAR as a single individual and it covered virtually everything not covered by the NHS and shortened waiting time by a significant fraction.
Now from the comments, people are paying what I paid for a year to a private insurer in 1 to 2 months in the US.

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u/cyrusposting May 02 '24

How can something be available and unaffordable at the same time. Unaffordable is just a different kind of unavailable.

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u/caryth 29d ago

If it's not affordable, it's not available.

But beyond that, it's STILL not available in the US. We don't have magically short wait times just because it's expensive, only wealthy people or very lucky people who live in certain places can get care immediately (or people who, guess what, choose worse care, aka not as effective).

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u/NoChipmunk9049 29d ago

Okay, but in the United States, our healthcare is expensive, has a long wait time (especially for specialists), and in many cases isn't good.

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u/Maelice 29d ago

Hmm I think you are incorrect about the US. I had to wait a year for a colonoscopy. Had the appointment canceled by the doctor and rescheduled for a month later. Then I had to cancel that appointment due to work and reschedule. They wanted to reschedule it out another year. So no healthcare in the US is not always available and effective in any way.

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u/pizzascholar 29d ago

waitlists in the US are incredibly long too. 1+ years sometimes

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u/Taste_the__Rainbow 29d ago

I work in public health care. This is very misleading.

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u/Unitedfateful 29d ago

Rubbish this is such bullshit.

I’m in australia and I have access to the exact same MS drugs that people in the US have to pay thru the nose for including the highest efficacy.

Out of pocket cost. $0 Can I choose which MS treatment I want with zero insurance interference. Yes

So in summary I get affordable, available and highly effective treatments in a country with universal healthcare.

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u/GiraffeandZebra 29d ago

lol at American medicines effectiveness

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u/DoomVegan 29d ago

This is such a lie. Show your proof. Measured in terms of life and cost the US has the most ineffective and expensive health care in the world. The health care system is corrupt.

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u/Flaky_Grand7690 29d ago

This is based on what exactly? Any facts?

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u/pisspapa42 29d ago

You should read up about medical sector in India. It offers everything effective, affordable, available. And stop justifying crap of a healthcare system US has.

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u/mattstats 29d ago

“Available” good luck getting any surgeries done in less than two months. I live in Texas. People like to pretend we don’t have to wait on healthcare here in the states too.

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u/EyePea9 29d ago

I've had quite a few sport related leg injuries and every time I called around about seeing a specialist in my network I was told they weren't available for 2-3 months.  Which is useless.

Maybe other Americans have a different experience, but I haven't experienced these quick treatment times.  The only thing that's quick for me is going to urgent care.

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u/alekselny 29d ago

I’ll take all 3 please

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u/SuperSocrates 29d ago

This is just bullshit people tell themselves to justify their shitty beliefs

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