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by gambiting
547 days ago
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Sure. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure American healthcare system can be amazing in certain cases, and like you said, in specific instances the "market demand" is able to solve issues that socialized systems struggle with. But the same is true in the opposite direction - plenty of stories of people being denied lifesaving care because insurance companies decide it's not worth it. People who have their cancer treatment stopped because their employer changed the insurer and the new insurer has to do a full re-evaluation before they approve the treatment to continue, so in the meantime you get no cancer drugs for months while they do their process. And so on and so on. We could both do this I'm sure. >>when patients in the US with appropriately good insurance receive them as first line with far better outcomes. The problem I have with that is basically you're saying the quality of the treatment depends on what insurance you have. In socialized healthcare everyone gets the same treatment. And in fact this is reflected in the average quality of care received on average, with outcomes in US being much worse than elsewhere. US has mortality from "preventable causes" twice as bad as Australia, Japan or France(paragraph 5). So in US few people get amazing care better than anywhere else. And most people get worse care than anywhere else. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/comp... >>Things like cutting edge cancer treatments (often developed in the US) are many years late arriving to public healthcare systems. Obviously it's hard to make a general statement on this because every country has varied policies around this. But to share an anecdote - my own dad was enrolled into an experimental programme at a leading oncology hospital in Poland because he had a very rare and ultra aggressive cancer which had no known treatment other than a brand new(then) Glivec, which wasn't even approved for that cancer yet, but he had the whole course of his treatment fully funded under our socialized healthcare. In those very very rare cases where regular treatment is not available there are avenues to explore experimental treatments, and they then serve to direct general treatment plans for the rest of the population. Again, this is a specific example from one country. |
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> people being denied lifesaving care because insurance companies decide it's not worth it
You get what you sign up for. Like in any business transaction, doing your due diligence and understanding the details of both parties obligation is table stakes. We also have courts precisely for cases when such disputes become intractable.
> so in the meantime you get no cancer drugs for months while they do their process.
No one is stopping you from paying for the drugs yourself. Insurance will reimburse you once they validate your claim. Bureaucracy takes time.
> the average quality of care received on average
And the quality of care on the upper end is markedly worse in many ways. Wealthy people from all over the world travel to the US for their medical procedures for a reason. You're effectively arguing that net-contributors to society (people who pay a lot of taxes) should accept an increase in their tax burden for the privilege of a degradation in their personal access to and quality of care, in order to bring up the average. I hope you appreciate just how directly this opposes the interests of this class.
> From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
You can't have a system like this in a free country. I want the freedom to associate (in an insurance pool) alongside other people with a similar risk profile to myself (eg. no drinking/drugs/smoking, daily exercise, good sleep, healthy body composition) to the exclusion of others. I want my insurance company to carefully scrutinize its applicants and claimants, on my behalf, to ensure that my interests are being well-represented. Insurance does not mean absolution from personal responsibility.