Compared to Other Nations, the U.S. Health Care System Isn't So Bad | Opinion

Newsweek ^

[DIRTYSECRET]

The Canadians have banned private health insurance for anything deemed medically necessary by the state. That has not resulted in a socialist paradise, where no medical claim is ever denied. The state keeps a lid on spending by forcing Canadians to wait for care.

The story is similar in Britain. Private insurance is legal. 1 in 8 Britons has it. They buy it because wait times for care in the publicly run health care system are interminable.

[Jonty30]

I do understand your desire for healthcare, and others here, but the solution was always in laying a foundation to have it and not in socialism..

As I mentioned, creating interest bearing HSA’s would have been the solution for healthcare. You could save and earn interest until you could provide for your own, without using others to do it for you and taking their future for yourself.

[Winniesboy]

I remember you citing that anecdote on a previous occasion. What I don’t think you disclosed then, and don’t now, was your own reaction at the time. Incredulity? Contempt? Awe?... and did you persuade her to change her mind?

[Political Junkie Too]

Do you understand that prior to Obamacare, Medicare was optional to join if you weren't claiming social security benefits like some Boomers who are deferring it until age 70? Many people had private insurance. Remember when Obama said "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor? If you like your plan, you can keep your plan?"

So don't blame Boomers for the state of health care today. Blame your generation who was conned into "hope and change." I wanted to keep my plan but was forced into Medicare by Obama's "fundamental transformation of America."

-PJ

[Jonty30]

I understand what you lost. I also understand that the young were taken advantage of by their general ignorance. Consequences don’t care about whether the person in question did it out of ignorance. It will still end badly.

I’m not blaming boomers for healthcare, but the advance of socialism over all. It will end badly for America and every other country that went down this road.

I don’t think we will reverse course, because nobody likes to be cut loose once they are on social benefits of some kind.

[Jim Noble]

I was neither incredulous nor contemptuous.

I was a bit surprised, but I had been living in Fulham for months, and had realized that this wasn’t America but with people who talked funny and drove on the wrong side of the road but rather was a really different place.

Andere Länder, andere Sitten.

The consultants were and probably still are the best in the world. The apprenticeship is very long (you can be a senior registrar for years).

What I took away was that for most British people I met (this was a long time ago) the tradeoffs were worth the price. When I got home people always asked me if we should have an NHS here.

My answer was, “if you put that system in place here the government would be overthrown in a month”.

Americans are impatient, can-do, demanding people and have bankrupted the country chasing the fountain of youth.

[minnesota_bound]

Canada now kills 1 in 6 people by murder err.. euthanasia.

[Jonty30]

In socialism medicine, you are always a cost and never a consumer, from the government’s point of view.

[Winniesboy]

It would be good to think the lady’s story had a happy ending, and that she had the treatment she needed. But it’s true that, especially for that generation who had held the Home Front during the war, in the hierarchy of mortal sins jumping the queue ranked somewhere between adultery and accidie.