Does universal healthcare actually work somewhere?

[kim foxx]

seems to work well in asia. people in taiwan pay $35 a month for medicare. if you have a job your employer pays that $35 for you.

america combines the worst of all worlds and functionally has the same health insurance industry as south africa, for similar reasons.

 

[Maurice Maine]

Works on paper but suffers every time there is economic turmoil and you get huge waiting times. Also money spent on useless bullshit like troon healthcare (SRS, HRT, etc)

 

[HyperboreanRightsActivist]

americans wouldn't be cheering for a guy that killed a health insurance CEO.

Europeans would do the same. I can't think of any country that wouldn't.

 

[Prokhor Zakharov]

When I was studying for my MBA I favored the Australian model that was in effect at that time. The public portion of the system was all the basics of care one might need, with a heavy emphasis on preventative medicine. Anything beyond the basics was private. I think this type of system is a good way to approach it.

I would also add on a penalty/reward part of the system for both the doctors and the patients. You go to the ER because you have a cold? They pay for what should have been an urgent care visit, the patient is responsible for the rest because they misused medical services. Doctor doesn't emphasize preventative health with his patients and they have an adverse outcome, the doctor misses something that causes it to be much harder and more expensive to treat, or they don't use appropriate diagnosis and just give everyone a CT? Congrats doc, you now have to pay the system for your laziness, malpractice, and overutilization of medical resources for your incompetence.

The flipside is if people who do everything right, they eat right, they exercise, they take their meds, they have a health crisis, the system rewards them by covering everything because they've made a point of being healthy and preventing cost to the medical system up to this point. Same for the doctors. They make sure their patients take preventative medicine seriously, they catch things before they become a serious problem, and they use the tools of medicine appropriately, they can bank that so if they do fuck up somehow, the system covers it because they have made a concerted effort to use the system in the most efficient way possible, or it could be a metric that is tied to compensation, with the best docs making the most.

If you don't carrot/stick people, they have no incentive to do the right thing. Very, very few people do the right thing because it is the right thing or out of the goodness of their heart.

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

There is a 100% overlap between countries that have universal healthcare and countries that will throw you in prison for saying mean words on twitter, just putting that out there.

 

[Whatevermancer]

There is a 100% overlap between countries that have universal healthcare and countries that will throw you in prison for saying mean words on twitter, just putting that out there.

How about countries that will throw you in prison for saying mean words on the phone?

Europeans would do the same. I can't think of any country that wouldn't.

It's just that private health insurance isn't really a thing in Europe.

 

[Grub]

Canada's used to be good. I don't really know exactly what the fuck happened over the last 25 years or so that completely fucked it up to the point it is now. But, it's a number of things.

 

[HyperboreanRightsActivist]

It's just that private health insurance isn't really a thing in Europe.

Private/public aside, do you think people would cry and moralfag if either of these three were shot?

 

[Fapcop]

No.

First of all, it depends on what kind of system you’re talking about. “Universal healthcare” is kind of meaningless. Who’s paying? How is it organized?

Some countries, like Canada, has a single payer system where the only actor is the government and you can’t even get a private doctor/surgery.

Other countries like Germany or Switzerland has universal healthcare in the form of mandatory health insurance, that’s run by a non profit megacorp.

There’s also countries like UK and Denmark, where the government is in charge of healthcare, but citizens CAN buy private medical insurance or services.

 

[kim foxx]

the flip side is actually allowing price discovery in healthcare instead of having the government take care of it. then you can either pay for your ICU out of pocket or die, it's that simple.

people in white countries would be aghast at that, even though that is what happens in pretty much everywhere else.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

UHC works in rich mostly homogenous countries. Arguably it would have worked well in the UK had the UK not decided to import all of the dregs from the decolonized Empire.

 

[Fapcop]

It's just that private health insurance isn't really a thing in Europe.

Not true. Depends on the country, but some have private hospitals and insurances and everyone who can afford it buys it, to avoid waiting lists.

Source: Live in Europe, has private insurance. As I recall, it’s like a fifth of the country that has it here.

UHC works in rich mostly homogenous countries. Arguably it would have worked well in the UK had the UK not decided to import all of the dregs from the decolonized Empire.

UHC, like all kinds of government welfare, only works if everyone pays into the system and the government doesn’t import millions of foreigners.

That’s also why European countries tend to have strict migration policies.

There are many ways to do healthcare, but the bottom line is this:

Healthcare is a limited resource that you either ration by money. Or time.

If you ration it with money, like they used to in the US before Obamacare, everyone who can afford it get good care.

If you ration it by time, like in single payer/public systems, everyone gets a kinda shitty system where medical care won’t bankrupt you, but you may have to wait weeks, months or years for surgeries and appointments (like if it’s a specialty field.)

Also: Another issue with public healthcare is that it invariably ends up as a political football. The major way to pay for it (aside from co pays) is taxpayer money, and politicians hate raising taxes.

So before every election, you get these gay fights about moving around 1% or 2% of the budget to pay for cancer surgeries instead of psychiatric care or whatever.

 

[The Ugly One]

What do you mean by "work?" The liberal definition of "working" is that nobody ever gets denied treatment they need, which doesn't happen anywhere, ever, under any system.

 

[FATTESTCUNT 2.0]

It used to work well in the UK.

I remember when I had no issues finding an NHS dentist, in fact, I could choose from a bunch of different ones in my home town.

I remember when I would always see the same doctor and getting an appointment with them only meant waiting a few days at most, and I could walk into my local surgery on any weekday and be guaranteed to be seen by a doctor (not a specific one) in under an hour.

I remember when wait times for specialist appointments at hospital were short, and where for things like mental health, there wasn't a preset limit on the number of times you could be seen.

I remember going to A&E a couple of times on Friday and Saturday nights and being seen in under an hour.

I used to sing the praises of the NHS, but now I think it's turned to dog shit, but the fact that it was so good for so long shows that it can work.

 

[Niggernerd]

It only works in Europe because the US allows it to work. They seethe and mong the fuck out when trump tells em to pay their share because that usually means they have to stop funding their stupid little social programs.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

@Celso Bin Portiolli Define universal healthcare and I'll do my best to engage in the topic

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

There isn't a such thing as a problem free healthcare system. And not all "universal healthcare" systems are great (see Russia), or even the same. I would also not conflate "free healthcare" with "universal healthcare."
It's also kinda weird to talk about universal healthcare, in a US context, considering most people (92%) do have healthcare through either their employer or Medicaid/Medicare. Contrary to common belief, healthcare is "free" for a lot of people in the US if they live in a state that expanded Medicaid/Medicare and live at the poverty level (i.g. unemployed people can get healthcare). This includes most states that aren't below the Mason-Dixie line. You could technically achieve "universal healthcare" if those states allowed the expansion.
They won't largely because of politics, but that's slowly changing. North Carolina is a good example.

 

[Dawdler]

It's just that private health insurance isn't really a thing in Europe.

You've never been to Europe ?

It only works in Europe because the US allows it to work. They seethe and mong the fuck out when trump tells em to pay their share because that usually means they have to stop funding their stupid little social programs.

Europe existed when trump was swimming in his dad's balls. Your sperging means nothing because the problem exists entirely on your soil and is exacerbated by people like you.

 

[Celso Bin Portiolli]

@Celso Bin Portiolli Define universal healthcare and I'll do my best to engage in the topic

A system where the goverment has free hospitals anyone can use at any time. That's how it is in Brazil.
Shit is so slow and underfunded there was a time a baby had to use an improvised respirator made out of cake wrapper.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

A system where the goverment has free hospitals anyone can use at any time. That's how it is in Brazil.

Without looking too deep into it, it looks like the SUS is being financed through taxes. So it is already destined to be inefficient.
Without being reliant on satisfied voluntarily paying customers, there is no incentive to actually do good work. And if the funding is through a coerced payment, such as taxes, you don't need to be efficient, customer-oriented, or even do anything of value at all. After all, these people are human beings - the less they work and the more they get paid for it, the better off they are.
It also looks like there are private healthcare next to SUS, similar to how it is in Germany.

Those systems are destined to be increasingly inefficient, of increasingly worse quality, increasingly expensive, and increasingly inhuman, before they fail