Universal Healthcare in the US

What's actually wrong with the concept of Universal Healthcare in the US? It would likely make healthcare more affordable for average people and increase the quality of life. Obviously doctors, the insurance industry, and other factions collude somewhat which actually make reforming the system as is nearly impossible, but is there any real chance that something like it could occur in the US in our lifetimes or in the near future? Or is it essentially impossible outside of some freak occurrence, financial collapse, mass awakening, etc.?

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who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/
usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2013/08/19/californias-doctors-lobby-to-prevent-better-heath-care
economist.com/node/21556227
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Communist

no goy we must continue profiting from people's health care

Are Denmark, Norway, Austria, Germany, and Sweden communist? Switzerland has a form of universal healthcare, not single-payer, but universal nonetheless, and has a higher economic freedom index score and freer overall markets and a better GDP per capita than America does.

It would require a President and a Congress that wanted to do it and were ready to face down the lobbying shitstorm.

Trump has said he wants everyone to have healthcare, but even if he came out for universal healthcare it'd be impossible.

I think the current system will probably break down under its own weight in the next 15-20 years however. When any type of healthcare becomes completely affordable to anyone without employer healthcare and small employers can't carry the burden any more so they begin to cut employees there should be enough motivation for some kind of reform.

There's nothing wrong with this in principle. If healthcare were actually affordable there wouldn't be any need to ask a question like this or come up with a solution or proposal requiring government involvement.

I was/am a senior ME pre med and I have a biomedical start up, which has taken over my life at the moment. I've spent over a thousand hours working with doctors and hospitals this past year. There is no collusion. The prices aren't set for profits. Why do people come to America for medical treatment? It's because hospitals/universities here pour funds into research and development. Sure, you are fine 90% of the time getting treated anywhere. But when you end up with some esoteric disease. America has your back. Medicine isn't just about treating people. It's about advancing our knowledge. Look at this table. America shits on every other country combined when it comes to developing medical knowledge. We wouldn't have the money or resources for this on universal healthcare systems. We are literally carrying everyone on our fucking backs.

More than that. No one in their right minds would go through the hell our medical students go through for the slave wages that they pay in other countries. Our education, residency, and fellowships are all YEARS longer and more stringent than any other country. Sure money isn't everything. But if you're giving over a decade of your life on training, you deserve it.

I'm sure that the people that die or are permanently disfigured because they can't afford medical care are very appreciative of that fact.

This graph isn't even labelled with axis titles.

Also there's no reason you couldn't still do a universal healthcare system and achieve the same results. It just wouldn't be a single-payer healthcare system, maybe something more like an insurance mandate like Australia, Japan, Switzerland, or the Netherlands.

Switzerland technically has a universal healthcare system and punches far, far above its population in terms of pharmaceutical innovation.

>What's actually wrong with the concept of Universal Healthcare in the US?
Every single plan I've seen kills medical research.

I think it owns that other countries that provide universal healthcare to their citizens get to be smug about it while riding the coat tails off US funded medicines and clinical trials that they take advantage of.

They are nat soc

The great irony of our current system is that the extremely poor and the extremely wealthy get all the care they need, it's the middle class that gets fucked and actually pays the bills for all this.

Even before Obamacare, no public hospital was allowed to turn away a patient because they don't have insurance.

No patient in America is forced to go without healthcare. There were always options.

The problem is the bill afterwards. Even then, hospitals would adjust the pricing if you really can't afford it. They would often eat the costs.

The thing is. Everyone wants to be treated at Johns Hopkins or Emory. So they want free insurance so they can go to private hospitals.

The US leads all medical research overall by far, but per capita Switzerland and the Netherlands actually produce more medical research documents with citations, despite these countries having universal health care. This pic is from 2015. The source for more current research is here:
scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=2700

> Sweden
> Nat Soc
Kek, I wish

>Even then, hospitals would adjust the pricing if you really can't afford it. They would often eat the costs.

Many people don't understand this is a possibility.

Also, sometimes it simply isn't. Or in the case of something like cancer, the copays even with decent health insurance can sink you. I have a friend who got breast cancer at 63 and had to file for chapter 7 after almost every penny she and her husband had got sucked away even with insurance. It's insanity.

...

Per capita is ridiculous. It's the same reason why America can't do scandanavian style socialism :with a gigantic land boarder with mexico, a big, poor agricultural sector, and comparatively loose immigration standards.

Even the half ass universal emergency care system we have is heavily taxed by the demographic issues.

If the swiss system is replicatable in the US, maybe you should isolate why it works, and pitch that

Now post how many of those people in those other countries went bankrupt from medical care.

There's also the fact the WHO has concluded that the U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, and France, which has a universal healthcare system, was cited to have about the best, if not the best quality of care overall in the world. The US also has a higher infant mortality rate than pretty much any other first world industrialized country.

paying for others' health care is retarded

who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/

The US has a higher per-capita GDP than Sweden, Norway, Denmark, or Germany, all of which can afford universal healthcare systems. There's no reason to think we couldn't afford one if they can.

>biomedical start up

Says the guy from the country which spends more of a proportion of its total GDP than any other country on earth while also receiving poorer overall care than most European countries.

Read this:
who.int/whr/2000/media_centre/press_release/en/

You know what. Honestly. If the US just made public hospitals free.

> I'd support the fuck out of that.

The problem is that they are placing restrictions on how hospitals operate.

They set maximums on what hospitals are allowed to charge. Private hospitals should be allowed to charge whatever they want.

They have restricted doctors immensely. Now doctors have to worry about being fined if the government feels they didn't actually need to order that CT. They don't care that the doctor was worried there might have been a brain bleed.

> If the US just made public hospitals free.
> they are placing restrictions on how hospitals operate.

Well the problem is the doctors themselves, they control almost completely what goes on in the industry, are against expanding the number of physicians too quickly which would threaten their profits, they're the ones who most support the insane level of regulation surrounding hospital operations since it prevents larger numbers of hospitals from opening which would provide more competition and drive prices down. Really at this point I'm convinced that the medical system of the US is so fucked and so full of shit from every group of people involved in it that the only thing that will change it is a revolution or countrywide financial collapse or something similar.

Actually let me expand on this.

The gov has proven themselves to be inept when it comes to healthcare policy.

They have established a Medicare policy that if you underperform on certain factors, they will reduce your finding.

But guess what. If you are in a loaded city center with more violent crime. You are going to have longer patient wait times and more deaths than the national average.

But the gov will make it worse by knocking down your funding with a hefty underperformance penalty.

> that pic

There are African countries that spend nothing per capita on healthcare feel free to go there :^)

What the fuck are you talking about? Give me a source for any of that bullshit.

The doctors got fucked. The new healthcare laws made it basically impossible to run a private practice, unless you're a basic GP. There's no more competition because doctors had to go back to the hospital umbrella to fit the bullshit restrictions. It's too dangerous to run a private practice.

Trump did come out for one payer health care. He has always been for it, and mentioned he was still for WHILE CAMPAIGNING, multiple times.

The problem is that the laws regarding it would be written to enrich the legislaturers friends and family while not being the best or even the "industry average". The amount of cronyisms that would be added is extreme.

Furthermore, the best the government can ever do something is half-assed. When the military is half-assed, that's acceptable because they will be fighting other government half-assed militaries. But do you want the VA to be the entire US health care system? Where no bureaucrat, no doctor, and no nurse is ever sueable or fireable? That's American fears--- we've seen what government health care is and the consequences of it. Multiple secret layers of waiting for health services so the people responsible for those services have "good metrics" and can get their Christmas bonuses. When discovered, the public is in a torch and pitchfork mob, but no one responsible ever loses their jobs, they just get bonuses from their government overseers for being so clever.

If the VA was well run and responsive, Americans would have demanded universal health care/single payer system decades ago. Instead, they want to avoid it like the plague.

It starts with acknowledging that bad things can happen to anyone at any time. You could wake up tomorrow and find out you have cancer, even if you're only a teenager. The treatments for that cancer could be more than many many people could possibly afford. This is only one example - There are countless other ways you could be injured without it being anyone else's fault.

Therefore, it's reasonable to say that NOT having health insurance is incredibly naive. So, if we start from the idea that everyone should have health insurance, then the question becomes, "What's the most efficient way to do that?"

The answer is a single-payer system. Basically, if one entity (the government) is buying all the health and all the drugs, they can negotiate insanely low prices because of the "bulk" they are buying the product in, much the same way that Wal-mart can get you a super-cheap TV because they buy so many of them.

In this system, you don't need insurance companies because they are an unnecessary "man-in-the-middle" that pads the cost between the entity that's getting paid (the doctors and hospitals) and the entity that's doing the paying (the government).

TL;DR - You basically **NEED** to have health insurance, and if you never end up needing it then you're "paying for somebody else's health care" anyway. Might as well make it as efficient as possible.

Actually there is more to this than that even. The patients got fucked.

Doctors used to basically be independent of the hospitals. They used the space but they were not actually hospital employees.

Now they are. So they have to follow hospital protocol on treatment. This pushed focus on saving the hospitals money.

If you had a leg injury a doctor used to be able to say "fuck everything. I'm going to make damn sure this kid walks again".

Now if it is more cost efficient and time effective to just amputate, the doctors have to follow the hospitals rules.

usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2013/08/19/californias-doctors-lobby-to-prevent-better-heath-care

economist.com/node/21556227

Meant to send these to you but my connection got completely fucked for some reason.

The pharmaceutical industry is so fucking expensive over there, that's part of the issue. You need to bring that shit under control somehow to make healthcare affordable

Medical companies need their profits. We can't do everything at cost. Pfizer spends 5 times their profits on research and development. Medical companies aren't a bunch of evil bad guys.

Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul, and a lot of the House Republicans and Democrats actually created and sponsored a bill that would have allowed us to get much cheaper pharmaceuticals through paying for a program to get cheap Canadian drugs, but pharmaceutical industries heavily control American politicians, and notably more Democrats actually came out against the bill, even Corey Booker, who's kind of looking like the Democrats' 2020 golden boy for President potentially. All because they're being paid to not do anything that hurts pharmaceutical interests in America.

Medical companies aren't the issue, it's the insurance companies.

Oh Lord. Idk why I clicked that expecting something intelligent. Yes. It is a terrible fucking idea to give NPs autonomy in treating patients. They're just nurses.

Booker is a piece of shit along with Trump for backing down on negotiations.

You can't have universal health care because people would use it

Real answer is the medical industry is profitable because there isn't universal health care, and in order to retain that profitability they 'sponsor' politicians, who they and their representatives(the people you see talking on the news channels) in turn push and promote the idea how bad universal health care is to people like those on this board who eat it up because politics is football and they're going to support their team wooooooo

>It would likely make healthcare more affordable for average people and increase the quality of life.
I have a NYC dwelling jewish friend. He's an investor and typically invests in medical industry and related things.

I've asked him about why is US healthcare so expensive and he said it short - doctors in the US earn twice as much as everywhere else in the world.

No matter what kind of system will you introduce it won't be any kind of cheaper because no doctor will want to work for you for less than he can earn privately.

at some point it's good to pay the premium. other times you're on the budget. for instance, im going to college and i needed cold medicine. i would love to get nyquil and dayquil but the budget version of it that target puts out is like 4-5 dollars cheaper. if i had finished my degree and were working for two years id pay the premium in a heartbeat

I went to a hospital for a finger infection. They put me on antibiotics which were working fine until a guy in a white coat came in and told me I have to get an expensive unnecessary x-ray done on my hand or else he's going to tell my insurance I went against doctor's advice and they wouldn't pay for anything done at that hospital.

This is how hospitals destroy peoples savings and credit. Tell me that wasn't set for profit.

This too, they're probably the single biggest culprit.