> I’m cutting and pasting; forgive me if I offend you, and ignore.
Not at all, I’m always up for additional information, as long as it factual, and not just some pundroid (mis)repeating something he or she thinks they heard somewhere, I’ve been reading widely on these topics for years, and one problem is the “Bulkinization” of discussion - people become convinced that *this* is the problem or the solution - when in fact the HCS is composed of a lot of various systems and actors, which often interact in very un-intuitive ways.
So the wider your reading (as long as you are careful not to become an un-reflective partisan of this or that sort of political or economic idealism), the better off you are.
One reason the Canadian system has lower “insurance” costs to providers is that medical and disability insurance to consumers covers more of treatment needed to correct medical errors, especially as as compared to un/under insured individuals in the US.
This is a good example of the sort of trade-offs I was discussing above: “universal coverage” and more comprehensive long-term disability coverage (without the the necessity to radically spend down assets to qualify for Medicad, as in the US) makes it both economically and politically possible more readily limit individual legal recourse against providers.
For political and cultural reasons, many US voters find this an unacceptable solution.
But as Canada experience demonstrates, its not an inherently impractical alternative.
I find it disconcerting, even as I "cherrypick," that the Kaiser Foundation does the same thing with regard to Japan in this study. They have a lot of technology as we do, but tight price controls on MD's, and one other thing, which again you tend to discount: about 50 lawyers per million population, while we have 500.