Let's hope you make a better fist of it than the UK - the NHS is currently unreformable to any significant degree, due to it being weaponised by the left.
Don't get me wrong, I think claiming the NHS has been "weaponized by the left" is idiotic, but I don't see how PC expenditures support or refute that point?
'Labour has defended the way it is campaigning on the NHS – but once again refused to confirm that Ed Miliband told the BBC that he wanted to “weaponise” the NHS in the election campaign.'
'The spokesman said: “I am not going to talk about words used in private conversations. They should not be shared and we will not talk about private conversations.'
Bit weird of you to use that NHS Providers site. Chris is here talking about the Conservative party making misleading claims:
> So here is a challenge to politicians who say they support the NHS. Be clear and straight about the numbers – for example, don’t double count what’s already been announced and don’t confuse five and one year commitments to boost a headline number. Acknowledge the scale of the funding needed to deliver services to meet our growing needs, and to rebuild our NHS, making it fit for the 21st century. That means looking beyond hospitals, important though they are, to other parts of the service which have suffered similar neglect, for which patients are today paying the price.
That "double counting" means that the amount of money being invested is less than claimed; the numbers of new staff being trained & recruited or retained is less than claimed; the numbers of new hospitals being built is less than claimed; etc.
The right would argue something like it's a trojan horse for spreading socialism more widely, or a means of bashing the government with constant attacks based on exaggerating its problems, scaremongering over potential reform/privatisation etc.
But anyway, before you attack it - I'm not the one that came up with it - that was the leader of the Labour Party Ed Milliband! It caused a political storm at the time. Clearly the media, political classes etc. did not consider it complete nonsense or they wouldn't have taken it seriously - nor would the government been able to hammer Milliband/the left with it for years.
I'd love to see an analysis of proposed reforms since 2010 that have tried to do anything other than move the NHS towards not being socialized medicine. I suspect the list would be vanishingly small.
Maybe this is me "weaponising" the NHS but you're going to have to provide a bit more evidence if you're making such a bold claim.
We all know the answer to this. Every single person in the world.
The way to fix the US system is for the health insurance market to be regulated like the auto insurance market, i.e., break up the state monopolies. Then for our employers to give us the money they're paying on our behalf. Then we could shop for a health insurance plan like auto insurance. Within a couple of years, the market would start sorting out the costs.
But no. We'll get socialized medicine. And it will look much like our disastrous Veterans Health Administration.
That's incredibly naive. I can already shop for health plans in the us, and it's a shitty result. The rest of the wealthy western world has national health insurance and it works really well. The US is the broken system with declining health of its citizens, even before COVID.
> The rest of the wealthy western world has national health insurance and it works really well.
If you talk to people who immigrate to US from those countries with national health insurance, you’ll find that what you claim above is by no means a consensus.
For example, I immigrated to US from Poland, and in my opinion, US healthcare is much superior to Polish socialized healthcare, in terms of quality and availability. Cost wise, it’s more expensive, but my out of pocket costs are too small for me to care about: my employer pays for health insurance, which is a benefit on top of my wages, instead of being subtracted from my wages like in Poland. My deductible is low, and so are my copays and out of pocket maximums. This is opinion shared by most of my Polish friends in US.
Back in Poland, socialized healthcare is held in low regard, lines are long, quality is low, and a lot of people, especially in cities, pay for healthcare from private providers anyway.
I'm in the software world in the US. My friends from the UK, Canada, Germany say they strongly preferred their healthcare in their home country. There are scattered things better here (sometimes wait times are less) but mostly it's a stupid waste of time system with enormous effort figuring out and arguing of EOB statements endlessly where you can never know what something costs until the insurance companies and medical providers stop arguing over the details.
Yeah, it's a shitty result. A family plan costs $25,000/yr. As I alluded to, there are state boundaries that present a pseudo-market of health insurance options. If we'd remove that regulation, and allow companies to sell policies across all 50 states, it would create more competition, and lower prices. If there was real competition here, every other ad on TV would be for Geico, Farmers, and FREAKING Liberty Mutual HEALTH insurance.
That's weird, old people sure do love Medicare. "75% of responses are either very satisfied or satisfied with their Medicare coverage. Only 6% said they’re either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied." [1]
See my comment above - the weaponise term is from a quote that was disavowed by the Labour leader-before-last, but that he certainly seems to have spoken.
'many campaigners who want to “Save” the NHS seem to want to do the opposite – to politicise the NHS so far that reform becomes a practical impossibility. They create alarm about cuts to local services, privatization, postcode lotteries and TTIP. They seem more motivated by anger, and fixated on political totems, than on trying to promote progress within the NHS.'
'The problem with Labour’s campaign to “weaponize” the NHS and turn it into a key political battleground, and its politically motivated and gimmicky manifesto pledges, is that it distracts from the real work that is needed: devolved reforms led by clinicians. We could have yet another 2 year hiatus. The NHS can ill-afford that.'
The kneejerk downvotes on HN are so depressing, especially when they are borne out of ignorance (not you btw, your comment is good).
When you consider the massive reforms carried out by Lansley (a Conservative health minister. These reforms caused huge problems, didn't particularly work, were widely misunderstood even by his own party, and are now being rolled back) and now the Hunt/Hancock/Javid reforms to ICSs it's just plain wrong to say "the NHS can't be reformed".
US per capita health expenditure: $11000USD (#1).
I don't know what the 'left' is doing there but it seems very efficient.