Irish Exit
Verified User
She is young and idealistic. Being in Congress will jade her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $21 trillion mistake
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She is young and idealistic. Being in Congress will jade her.
I'd take Germany's health system in a heartbeat over America's. Not only is it considerably cheaper, per capita, but it also involves less red tape for users, and produces measurably better public health outcomes.
Getin the ring
Verified User
do you sometimes feel ill equipped to be in a conversation, after reading your posts back to yourself?
So if another countries "health care system is cheaper",
the remedy?
get doctors to work for less, hospitals to curb profits?
I'm curious
and another countries health care system "has better public health outcomes"?
and that has to do with what in comparison to the US system?
they have better doctors, that by your "cheaper" assertion work for less?
Their medical science is more advanced?
I'm curious
and "less red tape"? <<<<my favorite
coming from a supporter of Obamacare, that's really rich
Tranquillus in Exile
New member
In countries with universal healthcare, people who want preferential treatment can opt to pay for it, usually with private medical insurance. There is no loss of freedom.
Added: Except in Cuba, I guess.
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I would too and I'd probably prefer Cuba's as well, but you completely missed the point of my post. I'll try to put it another way. Germany's hlth care system comes at a price paid in other sectors of their society. E.g. their banking system absolutely sucks. It is very, very heavily advantaged to banks at the expense of individuals. It's one reason such a high percentage of Germans will never be able to afford a house. Typically middle class families rent and live in apartments their entire lives. My father in law is a civil engineer and has always lived in apartments.
I'm not saying banking and health care are related, just that there are advantages and disadvantages when comparing societies.
Would you rather live in Cuba simply because they have universal hlth care?
If so, good for you but I suspect you'd be in a small minority.
No. Why-- is that a problem you suffer from?
In the case of Germany, there are a number of remedies that worked. For starters, their system is considerably streamlined relative to ours, which cuts down on administrative costs. They also keep their insurers from spending a lot on advertising, which in the US adds a lot of costs that have nothing to do with treating illness. And since they're non-profit insurers, the system isn't supporting the burden of shareholders who demand ever-larger cuts of the pie. Also, their government is much more willing to intervene to prevent price gouging (e.g., negotiating lower drug prices, etc.) They also focus more on prevention. And their system is more unified (as opposed to ours, where you have different socialized systems for old people and government workers, plus a jumble of private and semi-private systems). Germany also lowers the cost of education, which means you're not building the same kind of medical education costs into the price of medical services.
There are two main parameters for judging whether a healthcare system is working well: how much it costs, and what the public health outcomes are. We could lower costs greatly just by giving a lethal injection to anyone diagnosed with cancer, but that would not be a good public health outcome. When you look at Germany's public health, in terms of infant mortality, childhood mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, obesity rates, STD prevalence rates, disability rates at given ages, and rates of various other preventable illnesses, Germany tends to look a lot better than the US. So, it's not like Germany's lower per-capita healthcare costs are being achieved by way of providing lousy healthcare.
Yes, that's part of it. Doctors earn somewhat less there. But that is only enough to account for a minority of the difference. The US has titanic administrative costs in our system. We also tend to allocate our medical care inefficiently -- paying for the pounds of cure rather than the ounces of prevention, and blowing big bucks on end-of-life care, when you could buy vastly more extra years if you spent the same money earlier in life.
In the modern era, medical science innovations travel around the world very quickly, so for practical purposes, all advanced nations are working with pretty much the same toolkit of scientific tools. It's just a question of how we apply those tools. In the US, a lot of spending is done by the very rich on cutting-edge treatment for themselves, with diminishing returns relative to cheaper alternatives, whereas we often forego vastly more cost-effective treatments for the masses simply because they can't afford them. In countries with superior medical systems, more cost effective spending choices tend to be made. For example, think of the choice between a new titanium knee for a nonagenarian multi-millionaire, or basic arthroscopic surgery to clean up the knees of ten working-class thirty-somethings. The price may be the same for both, but the public health impact of each will be vastly different. That nonagenarian is going to be dead shortly, one way or the other, whereas if the ten working-class people in their thirties don't get their knees fixed, they may have chronically worsening arthritis that results in them being effectively crippled in a decade (followed by creeping obesity and early death). In terms of disability-adjusted-life-years, you get VASTLY more bang for your buck with one than the other.
Yep. Read up on it.
People in pretty much every other country have the same freedoms as in the US, from a medical perspective. If nothing else, you're free to come to the US and buy whatever healthcare you can afford here, just like Americans can do. It's just that Americans don't have the counterpart to that freedom -- we don't have the freedom to travel to their country and have high-quality care at no or low cost the way their citizens can.
Lightbringer
Loves Me Some Souls
Occasional-Cortex is not a smart woman.
That's a lie snowflake. Those claims are made in a vaccum of facts. The main reason the US healthcare costs are higher is that we can afford to pay more as a result of our economic prosperity and do not limit salaries of doctors or what they can charge.
In truth, a correct accounting of Canadian and European plans should include the fact that they have been funding their programs on the back of US innovations, US defense commitments and still, their budgets are in chaos trying to pay for their Progressive Social largess.
In addition, to properly ascertain the costs, one must also take into account the limits used to control costs that include the deaths and suffering caused by long wait times as a result of shortages in doctors, specialties and lack of state of the art equipment.
Of course, I am talking to a Canadian who has been completely brain washed and now thinks they can lecture Americans who have a superior system how to dumb it down to third world status. No thank you snowflake. STFU, seriously.
She's an idiot; morons like you trash Trump daily. STFU you brain dead, low IQ hypocrite on steroids.
Dear liberal dunce; she is tweeting from ignorance. Maybe she should try to STFU until she has some facts? You should take that advice to. You don't need top prove you're a clueless idiot every damned day.
Yo, dumbass, since Trump was inaugurated he is averaging 4.1% GDP growth. Obama's was 1.5%. Do some math and get back to us when you have even the slightest clue of what you are emotionally erupting about.
Nothing says dumb better than liberal's defending Obamunism.
Population density is the main reason for that. You find the same tendency towards apartments in the US, in dense urban areas.
No. But I'd strongly consider Germany. Unfortunately, it's hard as hell to get citizenship to any EU country.
First off, let's look at the fallacy of the claims of $21 trillion. How would that even be possible when the entire annual US budget is between $3 and $4 trillion and defense is a tiny fraction of that.
I think that people need to engage their brains before they erupt and buy what the media and liberals are selling. How can a bureaucracy that receives perhaps an average $500 billion annually misplace $21 trillion?
Anyone?
I am amused that you think he hasn't. Do you have any evidence to support that? Or do you just like parroting moronic DNC talking points?
So they have to PAY extra even after paying confiscatory taxes in order to get the basic care we already take for granted. Only idiots would prefer that to ours.
No, they do not. And in many cases, they suffer as a result of much higher tax rates that are continually increased due to the massive burden of Progressive socialism on their Governments budgets, and long waiting times, in some cases, dying before they have the operation.