Right, and we'd just be headed over a cliff like the rest of them. Nationalized healthcare is a disaster economically and in patient outcomes, not to mention patient and physician autonomy.
Back when I was taking a health care policy class and actually digging up these stats on a semi-regular basis, I typically saw the US in the middle of the OECD 20 pack. PDF page 46 of this report, for instance:
Exceptions: we do really well at treating breast cancer and diabetes. But sometimes we're at the bottom of the pack, too. Overall it's a wash.
> patient and physician autonomy
Like the freedom to go to any hospital in the country and know that it will be covered? The freedom to know that calling the ambulance won't cost you $12,000 which is somehow not covered by your plan? Or the freedom to have a claims adjuster who isn't financially incentivized against you? What about the freedom to spend half of the money you are forced to spend on our continued experiment with private health care? There are many kinds of freedom not provided by choosing between megacorp A and suspiciously similar megacorp B.
> Nationalized healthcare is a disaster economically and in patient outcomes
In the rest of the developed world, universal healthcare (both nationalized and on other models) is consistently cheaper (per capita and per GDP) than the US system, and produces overall comparable to better outcomes than the US system. So, if it is fair to say that "nationalized healthcare is a disaster economically and in patient outcomes", it is only in a sense where nationalized healthcare is still significantly less of a disaster in those areas than the US system is.
The US has by far the most expensive health system as percentage of GDP and I haven't seen any statistics that show that the outcomes are superior. In some areas outcomes are very good, in other areas not so much.
One place where health care is an economic disaster is the US.
If this is what an economic disaster looks like, where do I sign up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
> and in patient outcomes
Back when I was taking a health care policy class and actually digging up these stats on a semi-regular basis, I typically saw the US in the middle of the OECD 20 pack. PDF page 46 of this report, for instance:
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports/...
Exceptions: we do really well at treating breast cancer and diabetes. But sometimes we're at the bottom of the pack, too. Overall it's a wash.
> patient and physician autonomy
Like the freedom to go to any hospital in the country and know that it will be covered? The freedom to know that calling the ambulance won't cost you $12,000 which is somehow not covered by your plan? Or the freedom to have a claims adjuster who isn't financially incentivized against you? What about the freedom to spend half of the money you are forced to spend on our continued experiment with private health care? There are many kinds of freedom not provided by choosing between megacorp A and suspiciously similar megacorp B.