The best insurance scheme I saw was the Swiss system with both public coverage & a private one where you can get more acute care for advanced problems not covered. The problem is it is a small country with a lot of wealth like Scandinavia. I think a universal primary care system paid by a tax would work if you made check ups mandatory. Then you could have a private system where you pay like you do now. The truth is medical insurance isn't really an insurance it is simply a prepayment scheme. Countries the UK & Canada have the long term problem of underpaid medical staff working in their nationalized hospitals. My cousin's son-in-law from Toronto was a graduate of McGill and a general surgeon making about 30% of the starting salary at HMOs of private US hospitals so he just moved from Toronto to Boston and increased his salary 4X. What is Canada going to about this salary arbitrage? The UK to US differential is even worse.
Trump will solve this for Canada. Qualified doctors from shithole countries won’t be able to come to the US so they will go to Canada. in the meantime Americans will have higher healthcare costs but a shortage of doctors will mean fewer people will get treatments and thus healthcare spending will drop. edit: my sister is going to Colorado to ski this winter. Her instructor is an Argentinian doctor who makes more as a ski instructor in one month to rich douchebags than he does in 11 months as a surgeon in Argentina.
I guess this gives the lie to those that say if we pay physicians less in the U.S. they will just go elsewhere. Where would they go? There is an easy solution that benefit bot the U.S. and Canada. Just tax 100% of what U.S. Physicians make that exceeds what their Canadian Counterparts make! Use the proceeds to subsidize U.S. medical care. If you steal, why should you expect to hang on to what you've stolen once your caught?
Yea...current US healthcare is a cash grab of foreign doctors and nurses. We have an aging population and our healthcare costs are massive. But the gov and US elected leaders dont view the medical spenders as ''consumers''. Yet, they have been playing hardball with other ''more standard'' consumer spending power. There must be massive lobby power and direct power control from healthcare corps to Washington. Its clearly a dynamic of giant healthcare insurers collecting higher and higher premiums and then foreign doctors and nurses charging more and more on the labor side. I would tax them at a flat 50% on all income. For precisely the reason you mention above. Where else are they gonna go?
This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but I do understand your post. There are very few physicians in private practice anymore, the exception being plastic surgeons. Today's MDs work for clinics hospitals and corporations. They no longer determine the fees charged for medical procedures, but may have some input. Charges are negotiated periodically between and among the Government, insurers, clinics and hospitals. Beyond the standard and the routine, everything is a la carte. No one knows ahead of time just how many boxes of Kleenex, how many sponges and how many ice cubes will be needed. And no one can give you an accurate cost estimate. (I'm exaggerating only a bit. It's almost that bad.) It's a curious observation that today's most pleasant medical billing experience may involve cosmetic surgery which is usually not covered by insurance, and most often not directly associated with any major medical conglomerate. Your plastic surgeon's office will be able to tell you ahead of time, and to the penny, what a particular procedure is going to cost. There will be no insurance company involved. The procedures, some of which are very involved and would certainly come under the heading of major surgery, will usually not be done in a hospital operating room but in a private operating suite owned by the surgeon. The fee will be paid, and unexplained bills will not show up months later. This is of course similar to the way American medicine was practiced before Medicare, when most MDs were in private practice. Before Medicare, physicians routinely adjusted their fees according to what patients could afford. (My dad delivered a baby for a chicken during the depression and didn't complain.) I am not suggesting we should, or can, go back to what we had previously, but we can still do much better than we are doing now... In our attempt to force every part of our economy into a capitalist framework, even the parts that can't possibly fit, we have created a monster know as American "Medical" Care --- rife in inefficiency and corruption, thirty-sixth in the world in terms of access and outcomes, and number one in cost by a very wide margin. Our challenge is to die before the "system" devours our entire net worth leaving nothing for our loved ones. Access to, and cost of U.S. medical care is one reason young Americans should give serious consideration to emigrating. American medical "care". The only thing you will ever buy before you find out what it costs.
I wonder why? “ Colin Jost's stunned reaction as SNL audience CHEERS for very awkward reason By LAUREN ACTON-TAYLOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM06:46 22 Dec 2024, updated 17:23 22 Dec 2024 Share or comment on this article: 55shares Saturday Night Live shocked Colin Jost as they burst into cheers at the mere mention of Luigi Mangione. Jost began his comedic news roundup on SNL's Weekend Update with co-host Michael Che but was stunned by the response when he said the name the UnitedHealthcare CEO's suspected killer. Within moments of Jost uttering 'Luigi Mangione' and his photo appearing on the screen behind him, the SNL audience erupted into applause and loudly shrieked in delight. Jost appeared to be caught off-guard and slightly surprised as he looked out at the crowd. With a hint of confusion, he said: 'Yeah... definitely woo.' 'You're wooing for justice, right?' he said with an awkward laugh. The comedian carried on discussing Mangione's extradition to New York's Rikers Island, followed by saying, 'In related news, Bumble exploded.' The moment didn't go unnoticed online either, with viewers flocking to X to see if anyone else caught the crowd's response. One person said: 'The #SNL crowd loudly cheered for Luigi omg.'” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...s-luigi-mangione.html?ico=amp_related_replace “ Bombshell report reveals UnitedHealth's callous cuts to child healthcare after CEO assassination Health insurance conglomerate UnitedHealth Group is engaged in a secret mission to cut company costs at the expense of thousands of children with autism, an investigation found. Previously undisclosed internal documents obtained by ProPublica lay out a plan to limit coverage for the gold standard in therapy for children on the autism spectrum, many of them poor….” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/...-child-autism-insurance-denials-ceo-shot.html