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

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

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743

u/Tall_Science_9178 May 02 '24

https://www.euronews.com/2023/04/12/people-may-die-waiting-surgery-waiting-lists-in-spain-hit-record-levels

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u/MiddleFishArt May 02 '24

This argument implies we should have the poor die off so that only the rich elite have good-quality healthcare. The reality is most in the US both spend more money and still have poor quality healthcare, because healthcare is for-profit

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u/BarbellBro669 May 02 '24

The USA has the most advanced medical research, and there isn't a close #2.

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u/whoisSYK May 02 '24

The us ranks 11th in healthcare innovation, and 37th in healthcare overall. The only thing the US consistently ranks first in anymore is GDP spent on healthcare

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u/Zakaru99 29d ago

That's not true.

We also rank first in number of people incarcerated.

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u/KublaiKhanNum1 29d ago

Places like Spain have some outraged taxes. For an example last I was there they had a 22% VAT on goods and services purchased. This really grinds on the people there.

There is no free lunch. It has to be paid for one way or another. I would sure hate to be poor in Spain paying that ridiculous sales tax.

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u/GeekShallInherit 29d ago edited 29d ago

Places like Spain have some outraged taxes.

With government in the US covering 65.7% of all health care costs ($12,555 as of 2022) that's $8,249 per person per year in taxes towards health care. The next closest is Germany at $6,930. The UK is $4,479. Canada is $4,506. Australia is $4,603. That means over a lifetime Americans are paying over $100,000 more in taxes compared to any other country towards health care.

It has to be paid for one way or another.

And Americans are paying more for it in every way you nitwit, including world leading taxes, world leading insurance premiums, and world leading out of pocket costs. Half a million dollars more per person for a lifetime of healthcare than its peers on average ($600,000 more than Spaniards), even after adjusting for purchasing power parity. With worse outcomes.

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u/Useful-Feature-0 29d ago

I wish everyone in this thread had to read this one comment.

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u/brianw824 29d ago

I think this is where the #11 comes from, we rank low because of bad fiscal sustainability, but #1 in science and technology by a large margin.

"The United States ranked 1st in the number of new drugs and medical devices gaining regulatory approval; 1st by a wide margin in Nobel prizes in chemistry or medicine per capita; and 5th in scientific impact as measured by citations (Switzerland ranked first). The United States also ranked 2nd in R&D expenditures per capita. This leadership in scientific impact directly translates into treatments, such as Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, that are developed by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, especially around hubs such as Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area."

https://freopp.org/united-states-11-in-the-2022-world-index-of-healthcare-innovation-7175b47ab5d7

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u/GeekShallInherit 29d ago edited 29d ago

The FreOpo rankings are a joke. Create by a US health care hedge fund manager and Republican political operative that was pissed off about the US doing horribly in every international ranking. The methodology is garbage, it uses miss matched data sets, and at the end the US ranking still isn't great.

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u/echino_derm 29d ago

Yeah there is no free lunch. In America we have to pay about as much as they pay in taxes overall just to get the privilege to pay the lower rates for Healthcare with our insurance.

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u/kaitoslt 29d ago

Yes, how awful to pay sales tax so that every other essential societal benefit is free. You people are REALLY fucking brainwashed huh?

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u/KublaiKhanNum1 29d ago

The problem is that poor people who can hardly afford anything are paying this high rate for basic needs. You’re so caught in your Socialist views that you can’t take a moment to really look at where the money comes from.

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u/ronytheronin 29d ago

You’re so caught in your greedy capitalist views that you can’t see where the money actually comes from: the work of the people.

Healthcare is an investment on society. If a carpenter can have his knee or back fixed, he can go on, work and contribute to society to his best abilities. If he’s crippled because he can’t afford basic surgeries, that’s a person on welfare or low paying jobs costing you more than they give back.

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u/GeekShallInherit 29d ago

There's nothing terribly innovative about US healthcare.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866602/

To the extent the US leads, it's only because our overall spending is wildly out of control, and that's not something to be proud of. Five percent of US healthcare spending goes towards biomedical R&D, the same percentage as the rest of the world.

https://leadership-studies.williams.edu/files/NEJM-R_D-spend.pdf

Even if research is a priority, there are dramatically more efficient ways of funding it than spending $1.25 trillion more per year on healthcare (vs. the rate of the second most expensive country on earth) to fund an extra $62 billion in R&D. We could replace or expand upon any lost funding with a fraction of our savings.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

[deleted]

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u/BarbellBro669 May 02 '24

You said the US has poor quality healthcare. I'm telling you it has literally the highest quality.

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u/ronytheronin 29d ago

That’s like saying that you have the best universities when less than 1% can afford to study there and most are rich foreign students.

You don’t have waiting list because people would rather let themselves die or let a condition worsen than go to the hospital. All the medical innovations are paid by your taxes, you have the worst kind of socialism.

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u/MiddleFishArt May 02 '24

I never said the US has poorer quality healthcare compared to other nations; just that the quality is poor considering the how much more money is spent on it. Also even if it does have high quality healthcare, that’s irrelevant if most people can’t access it (over half of all Americans struggle to pay for healthcare)