Posted on 12/23/2024 3:41:58 PM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
I think the best system for the US are interest bearing HSA’s. You set up a HSA that bears interest, so you help fund the free market and draw an income from it and you can pass it on to somebody if you don’t end up using it all yourself.
Eventually, you’d have yourself fully funded for healthcare without having to rob somebody of their future for your present benefit.
In Singapore, they whack you heavily in taxes until you have your final care paid for, but you are responsible for your personal maintenance healthcare. IMO, that’s better than socialism, because you aren’t robbing others of their future for your present benefit.
Medical expenditures per capita in the US, on a PPP basis (cost parity) are something like 50% higher than the Euro average. This has been so for the last 30 years.
Euro taxes are NOT hidden! They stare me in the face daily!
This has nothing to do with how these medical expenditures are paid for. Nor has it anything to do with US military expenditures. Medical care is a rather smaller part of social spending in Europe than in the US, believe it or not. Pensions, unemployment, general government salaries (the size of the state, for instance there are way more police per capita in Europe), thats the big difference.
Its simply that anything medical in the US is vastly more expensive than in Europe. The US has piles of regulatory and legal complications that drive costs up. Its a bit counterintuitive to say that a US “free market” is more burdened by regulation than “socialist” systems, but it is true regardless.
The 20% are where the differences in lifespan are going to show up, because these are almost all old people. And yet Europe beats the US. Btw, there is no great level of complaints about getting MRIs, etc in Spain or France, nor waiting times for doctors.
Ex, an 80 year old in Spain and France can expect to live another 10.11 or 10.61 years. The US is between 7 and 9 years, though that is based on old data.
It just seems more expensive, but I doubt it is, if you were to do a financial audit of the respective healthcare systems and their sources of funding. All socialist nations use hidden taxes to conceal how much they screw over their citizenry.
In America, you live one gradient better on the same income than in Europe.
I would never want socialized medicine if I had a choice in the matter. Socialized medicine is a big reason why I am not loyal to my country. If my country’s survival was dependent upon me, and me alone, I will lift up a beer to the demise of Canada.
Socialism has made Canada a criminal nation that can only do right when it ceases to exist.
“I’m not going to say that healthcare is more expensive in the US than Europe, because Europe uses the general tax base to fund healthcare through hidden taxes. If somebody could do an honest evaluation, it’s probably a lot closer than one realizes.”
Look about 45% of the way down:
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/funding/health-funding-data-analysis
USA 14.1% of GDP
Germany 10.9% of GDP
Australia 7% of GDP
“The range of reimbursable curative care services is defined by two coexisting positive lists/fee schedules: the Classification Commune des Actes Médicaux (CCAM) and the Nomenclature Générale des Actes Professionnels (NGAP).”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1388081/
Per capita health expenditures in $PPPs
4,600.4
(2016)
9,892.3
(2016)
5,550.6
(2016)
5,385.4
(2016)
3,248.4
(2016)
4,192.5
Guess which one is for the USA.
https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/French.health.system.03.2018%20(1).pdf
Sources of funding are irrelevant if you are just auditing expenditures, and that is a standard part of national accounts reporting.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
” All socialist nations use hidden taxes to conceal how much they screw over their citizenry.”
This is an assertion without evidence. Indeed, the US is a specialist in this because it has tended to hide taxation as “unfunded mandates” - look it up. There are economic arguments on all this going back a half-century.
nice one, thanks !
You’d have to prove to me that European healthcare is funded only through direct taxation. No GST’s or taxes on chocolate bars or cars or homes, no general revenue taxes that get redirected towards healthcare. I find that questionable, because liberals are never honest about anything.
Then you have the problem of no children to fund future expenditures. Europeans killed their children to make healthcare affordable for them, consequently having to import replacements for their children. Those replacements are destroying the European continent and are not planning on being participants in the socialst experiment, beyond being users of the system. They will vote to get the European to pay for it all, however.
Sources of funding are not irrelevant, if you’re going to make a claim that Americans pay more than Europeans. I don’t question that the spending is more user direct, but hidden taxes that go towards healthcare are still costs to the taxpayer.
If you’re going to make a claim that AMericans pay more, you have to show that Americans pay more overall, as opposed to having it come out of pocket more directly. Paying a lifetime of taxes for healthcare does not make it cheaper than when you pay directly out of pocket.
It also doesn’t justify, ever, removing the future from the children for present benefit. That $200,000, if invested instead, would have been worth approximately $700,000 today and generated an income of about $30,000/year. That’s a direct cost to me, paying for the healthcare of others cost me my future with no benefit to me.
“It just seems more expensive, but I doubt it is, if you were to do a financial audit of the respective healthcare systems and their sources of funding. All socialist nations use hidden taxes to conceal how much they screw over their citizenry.”
As I understand matters Swiss hospital capital costs are financed by property taxation. In Florida and Texas, property taxation for public hospital funding is fairly common.
There are various tariffs that are published. Circa 2010 I did research. I can do such research again, and post examples.
“On March 31, 2023, the Agency for Technical Hospital Information (ATIH) published the 2023 DRG tariffs and tariffs for other packages and supplements.”
https://mtrconsult.com/news/2023-drg-tariffs-published-france
We aren’t really talking about socialism here.
The degree of state control (socialism) over medical care, between the US and, say, France is about the same. Both are largely funded by taxation, both have a strong element of employer mandates, both have highly regulated private insurance, both have mostly private medical care delivery, but highly regulated. In terms of who pays, between taxes and mandates the French cover 100% and the US covers 90+%. Thats not a substantive difference.
The difference is that the French system is more efficient, and that is not a matter of who pays, but is driven by the chaotic regulatory structure of the US.
Americans pay more whether the money comes from taxation (most of it), employers (part of it), or out of pocket to insurers or directly.
That all comes out of national accounts, which capture overall revenues by industry. Unless the US or France have a large number of under-the-table doctors or prescription drug vendors, thats going to reliably capture what is actually spent.
Again, there is no justification for taking away people’s futures for one’s present benefit. You’ll never get me to see it otherwise. Property is a Biblical concept and a person’s future is the property of that person. Stealing their future is stealing from them.
It’s a question of dollars. Paying for socialism makes people poorer in Europe. While American property may be more severe, in some places than Europe, it’s a lot easier to get ahead monetarily in America than Europe. European socialism is meant to preserve a stratified society, where those who are poorer are kept poorer through regulations and removal of income for taxation purposes.
Costs are lower in the US, on practically everything, than Europe. The main reason is that America has lower overall taxes than Europe. People have the freedom to use their tax differential on healthcare if that is what they choose.
I worked in the NHS for a year when I was a senior in medical school.
There is no perfect system. When I was there the fact that no payments from patients to doctors or hospitals was very important to the users of the system.
Anecdote: I was working in an Oncology unit. My landlady asked me to check a lump in her neck. Rock hard. Obvious cancer.
This was in March. Her GP had arranged an appointment for her in my unit several months hence.
“Oh no”, I said. “Come with me tomorrow and we’ll see the doctor”.
I will never forget the look on her face, like I had slapped her. “Oh no! It wouldn’t be right!”(To jump the queue).
Obviously that would never work here. But for the British people of that time, waiting and paying the price was superior to bankruptcy from
Medical bills, which my colleagues of the day thought was an obscenity.
My point is narrow. We arent talking about the viability of the welfare state.
In the US, in fact, medical costs make up a higher %, and per capita absolute ependiture, than in Euro countries. The US is worse off IN THIS PART of its own welfare state than Europe.
You are talking about socialism. The crap about government having to have its name on the ownership document for it to be socialism allows the loophole the liberal wants so he can work towards 100% taxation and wealth redistribution without having to acknowledge the socialism he desires. 100% taxation and 100% wealth distribution and it’s not socialism, because the government doesn’t have its name on the ownership document.
If it walks like wealth confiscation and wealth distribution, it is wealth confiscation and wealth distribution, regardless of what you want to call it.
Just because the US has become corrupted by socialism does not mean socialism is justifiable. You can never justify using somebody, until they get used up, for your personal benefit. It’s an evil mentality that views other people as resources for themselves. It’s nothing less than plantation values. The liberals wants to turn the US into a plantation nation, so he can live well on other people’s money.
Sorry, Europe is an enslaver continent. Their hewing to socialism is why Europe is being removed from the face of the earth. They have been judged by God and found wanting. If they don’t repent, they will be no more and replaced by somebody else.
American taxes are lower than Europe. Consequently, the standard of living in America is higher than Europe, when you compare identical incomes.
I can go buy property in America for as little as $10,000 and throw a trailer on it and call it home. I can’t do that anywhere in Europe. I’m not saying that I’ll get prime property for that $10,000, just that it is there.
Pick any aspect that comprises a standard of living and it is better in the US than in Europe, because of the differences in taxation.
Healthcare is welfare, so you are talking about the viability of healthcare when you are talking about the viability of the socialist state. Europe, in its desire to have its socialism, is choosing to go extinct rather than admit they were wrong.
They have delivered their children to enslavement and extinction rather than try to have a system that works.
Until you show me an audit to show all sources of funding in Europe and the US that goes towards their respective healthcare systems, it’s not with credibility that European healthcare is cheaper than the US. Taxes on goods and services, to pay for healthcare, leaves you poor than no taxes on goods and healthcare.
As I have said, the US has its own huge loopholes of “socialism”. If you are going to call country A “socialist” and country B less socialist, then you have to take these things into account. And there is an extensive literature out there on just that.
Socialism is bad. But thats not the point here.
We were, IIRC, discussing medical costs.
All sources of funding = total revenues of medical industries.
Which I have shown you.
It has to zero out in the books.
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