Imaginos1892 wrote:Too bad none of the people he killed had guns.
How many cases have their been in the US where the attacker - armed with a gun - was killed by an armed civilian, especially before he managed to kill at least two people?
Why do so many people in countries with 'free socialized health care' choose to pay — a LOT — for private health care?
Because typically UHC doesn't pay for everything. If you want additional/expanded services (e.g. most UHCs apparently offer only limited dental support) - or quicker service in case of non-urgent issues - private insurance can supplement that.
However, the presence of UHC makes private insurance less essential, and thus it's less of a sellers' market, reducing prices.
To take myself as an example - I pay somewhere between 500-600 USD monthly for health coverage for my entire family. However, about three quarters of that is health tax (the rest is private, and honestly I'm probably a bit overinsured and could reduce the cost further). Since health tax is a progressive payroll tax, it means that should my income be reduced, my health care costs will also be reduced. My wife is currently unemployed so we don't have to pay health tax for her at all*. We're still eligible for all health services, though.
Compare this to the US, where loss of a job means the loss of all your health coverage unless you're eligible for COBRA or have health insurance not through your employer, which are to my understanding very expensive and don't take your now income-less state into account.
*Although this is a benefit only available to married women - other unemployed would pay ~30 USD/month.
Why? Dead people don't need health care, so letting your patients die is bad for business. In private health care, treating patients yields profit. In socialized health care, patients are an inconvenience, and medical treatment is an expense to be minimized.
On the contrary. People in an insurance plan are sources of profit to a health company
when they're healthy. Once they become sick, they're a loss; and if they become seriously ill, they cost more than they bring in. For a for-profit company, it makes sense to drop them at that point (and arguably, given that publicly-traded companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits, they have aduty to do whatever they can not to pay out. In socialized health care, the payer doesn't have a motive to give out the absolute minimum because the standards of success are not profit.
What we have wound up with in the U.S. is not even a semi-free market. In our bastardized system, the customer is not the patient, but the insurance companies and their management. The patient is not allowed much choice of doctors, hospitals and services. The costs are concealed and dispersed. All your scathing indictments of free-market health care are directed at the parts that are NOT free-market.
The government's place is to regulate the market, not to be the market.
Give the patient a stake in his/her own medical decisions! Let the patients choose the right treatments at the best prices, and you will see costs drop, and services improve.
Transparent pricing might help (but the need for it being due to insurance companies is very much the result of a free market, unless you're advocating for a system with no insurance companies at all) but there are still fundamental problems. for one thing, it's useless in an emergency situation - if you have a heart attack, you're presumably not going to ask the ambulance crew to wait while you go through the medical equivalent of Yelp. And even for elective procedures, many medical issues can be very opaque due to their complexity, which leaves a consumer ill-equipped to determine exactly what service he needs and the pros/cons of doing it at a specific hospital. And that's made even more true by the fact that when you go into a hospital, you don't necessarily know what's wrong, so you can't assess and price in advance the necessary procedures.
