| "The rest of the world just shakes its head at the US healthcare system." Perhaps on the cost, but the US has the best doctors in the world. If I need major surgery, I know I can get it in a reasonable amount of time. In many other countries in Europe or even Canada, the government gets to decide if I need to get it or not and the wait time could be in years. Everyone says the elderly in the US will go broke after a single major surgery. My dad is on Medicare with a low-cost supplemental insurance. He's been in multiple hospitals for the last 6 months and short-term care for the last 6 weeks. He was treated for sepsis twice and got a pacemaker installed (this doesn't include drugs, meals, everything else that comes with his stay). His cost out of pocket? $0. My elderly relatives have to wait many months to get surgery in Canada. The UK also has a failing healthcare system. The issue is that in times of economic downturns, socialized medicine gets cut. I don't think I've seen a single example of socialized medicine that doesn't end up with long wait times for major surgeries or the government making health decisions for you. A better system would be to have no insurance on procedures that are extremely common (where the free market can reduce the costs, like Lasik eye surgery) and only have insurance on ones that aren't so common and won't benefit from the competition. |
Do you have much experience with this major surgery in a reasonable amount of time, or are you just taking it on faith? Because my experience is the US system has the exact same "government gets to decide if I need to get it or not and the wait time could be in years" and "government making health decisions for you" - only that government is made up of private corpos and isn't even nominally democratically accountable. My experience with the US system is that each step of a process gets booked 2-6 months out, and any kind of major surgery will require many steps of referrals - testing/imaging, follow ups, first line treatments that need to be tried, etc. So time can most certainly add up to years from first could-have-been-diagnosed until actual treatment.
And excuse me for getting personal, but have you been in the hospital with your dad advocating for him? Or at least through the phone? Because my experience doing that for multiple family members has made me see the system's failings in galling detail, to the point that I would never write a comment saying our healthcare system is effective. And FWIW, "sepsis twice" seems like a possible red flag that his care isn't as good as you might think it is