| I have this to add: private health care is an incredibly poor system when it comes to the health of a nation, IMO. It leads to higher costs, unaffordable procedures, and a whole shitload of other problems. Now, I just know that someone is gonna come here and say "well in Canada you have to wait 5 years to get a broken finger set," and I will call bullshit on that in advance. While there may be some longer wait times for certain procedures, if you desperately NEED it, you WILL get it.
And I am sure that Phoenix will come forward with something about how socialized medicine costs so much money and it's a waste and so on. That's a complete falacy, one that I think most people would be surprised to hear. As a percentage of GDP, the US spends more on health care than virtually any other nation in the world. This is overall, private and public funding (health care premiums, government funding, so on) in total. Couple that with the fact the US has one of the highest GDP's per capita in the world (and if there's any countries with a higher figure, they're tiny little oil rich nations or something), and you can see that the US spends much more than anyone else for health care.
And don't give me some crap about "yeah well our system is just THAT much better than anyone else's." I will again call bullshit. While the US does have an excellent medical system (for those who can afford it) so do numerous other nations, all of which have longer life expectancies than the US. Canada, Japan, UK, France, Germany, half a dozen or so Scandanavian countries, and so on all spend less on health care, have universal access, and have healthier populations.
It's really a shame that the US continues to hang on to the private model because of ideology and ignorance, but I doubt it will change any time soon. |