FREE NEWSLETTER
So reads a Wall Street Journal headline.
This begs the question, how do Americans want to pay for their health care?
Quite a conundrum isn’t it? No system in the world can deliver all that
Yes, dealing with an insurance company can be a hassle and frustrating. They do screw up as do providers submitting the claim. Insurance companies are other Americans doing their jobs, but they can never satisfy all the above criteria.
65% of working Americans with employer benefits are in a self-insured plan. It’s their employer concerned with costs, not an insurance company.
What are Americans willing to give up for what they want?
Between Medicare, Part D and Medigap coverage, Connie and I pay nearly $2,000 a month in premiums. Is that too much to ask?
The real issue is that people want health care, not health insurance.
I know many people think that they would have health care if we had a single-payer healthcare system in the US.
Well, I am here in England right now to visit my 92 year old dad, and on the day I arrived he was taken to the ER (A&E).
Almost every non-medical service is outsourced to the lowest cost provider, because no one wants to pay higher taxes. The result of using lowest cost providers is that the first blood test “didn’t work” because the provider claimed, wrongly, that there was not enough blood drawn. We saw the nurse take a full vial, and the test requires a drop. So a second blood draw is taken, this time by the doctor. Still apparently not enough to do a test.
By now the ER’s performance dashboard on the screens for the medical staff is showing 74% of normal, and is very red.
The result of that is dad gets released from the ER, the metric literally immediately goes to 76%, and my dad is in the “evaluation center”. Still no results from the blood.
It’s now been 8 hours, so the doctor sends my dad home, without those blood test results.
One thing most people think is that a single-payer healthcare system means great medical coverage! Absolutely not the case.
Did you know that the average Accountant in the UK makes more than the average NHS doctor?
Given the ER dashboard and the inability to get simple blood test results, would you believe that the above-average competency doctors tend to leave the NHS single-payer system for private practice.
So we have a two-tier healthcare system here in England. Everyone pays through their taxes for the NHS, and anyone who can afford it “goes private”.
A can’t-raise-taxes single-payer healthcare system means my brother-in-law waited 3 years for his first hip replacement, and 4 for his second. My other brother-in-law “went private” and got one done in 4 months.
People keep writing as if the UK model is the only alternative to the US system. Nothing could be further from the truth. Plus, the UK system has been starved of money by over ten years of Conservative Party rule, and of workers by Brexit. Even so, my niece, whose husband was diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancer a year ago, says that some of the care has been “brilliant”. Just not all.
If you want to see a functioning alternative look to France, generally held to have the best system in the world. Or Germany, with maybe the oldest. Or Switzerland, where people are required to buy basic health insurance
People don’t even make the distinction between universal coverage (Medicare) and a health care delivery system like the NHS. Not even a close comparison.
And it ain’t “free”. I was just looking at the funding and in the aggregate UK citizens pay 4.5% of their income to have NHS.
There seems to be a severe shortage of critical thinking in our society. That was made abundantly clear during the election campaign, and is especially true of social media. I believe it was Mark Twain that said, “There is nothing so uncommon as common sense.” I believe that is truer today than it ever was.
<