therealist – Don’t like your doctor? Your hospital? Your medication? Your insurance? Then you can get rid of them and get whatever you want. Can you do that in a government-run health care system? Or have you instead put your life and death decisions in the hands of a bureaucrat?
I cannot get rid of my hospital. It is the only one within 50 miles. I cannot shift meds, because my pitiful isurance dictates which generic they will cover. There are only 3 private insurers in my state – and they all offer roughly the same rates which increased 6-8% every year Bush was in office, plus steadily increasing “deductables” limits. You might actually say we have two insurers, because the 3rd only has a “caring caregiver network” based in the State’s Big City…130 miles from where we live.
Nor are people in other advanced nations stuck with a doctor that a bureaucrat selects. You get a primary care provider and can shift if the one you are steered to doesn’t cut it.
People “put your life and death decisions in the hands of a bureaucrat???” – no, in all the world’s other advanced nations, doctors make the calls and limits are imposed on coverage and larger decisions that do impact health care – like a rural trauma care center or dialysis for a person with advanced lung cancer are resource-determined. Rather than the US decision model of a bureaucrat bean counter employed by people wanting to make a profit off illness deciding if it is profitable or not do do the trauma center (almost always – no) or futile treatment on the dying (typically yes, because the American taxpayer now foots urgent end of life major expenses if no one else will)
“Can you do that in a government-run health care system?”
Typically, more modern nations still have a very large private enterprise system working with the Health Ministries as services and equipment providers – much of it more competitive and at a lower cost than the USA. (Healthcare and drugs are 50% more per capita in America than in Japan and most European countries – and that includes all those 1/6th of Americans excluded from care).
Lets add another filthy little feature of the Free Market for Freedom Lovers! US system. If you are poor, excluded from health insurance by a pre-existing condition in yourself or family member…many doctors will cut you a break. Even drug companies. But not hospitals or nursing homes, which actually charge uninsured patients 40-60% more than insured ones or those protected by Government medicare and medicaid -because individual Americans “neglected” to negotiate the discounts in cost and charges that gov’t on behalf of it’s present wards & insurance companies and their lawyers negotiate for their clients..
