[rnk]

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.

[xyzzyz]

> 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.

[rnk]

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.

[arcticbull]

It also costs $2000USD per capita vs the US $12000 per capita. Fund it 6X and see what happens. Heck, fund it 2X and see what happens.

[TheRealDunkirk]

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.