Seriously, just copy the EU on healthcare. You might need to pay extra taxes, and take an extra insurance against hospitals fees. But it's all very affordable.
If it wasn't for A) getting the same answer for most of my ills: inflammations :p B) The doctor being very busy. C) Basic respect to not stress our medical system. One would go for the tiniest medical complain.
It isn't a "duh" problem in the US. Especially in the presence of less educated or rural communities, who buy media propaganda that socialized medicine kills grannies, and amongst retirees who are already getting thousand dollar checks each month from the government but don't want anyone else getting any benefits, because the uninsured are "jobless hippies".
That, and there is a huge insurance lobby ripe with exploiting the corruption of congress and the 2 party oligopoly that keep pressure on maintaining insurer profits.
We pay significantly more by having every uninsured person come in with emergency needs rather than seeking preventative care, but the average American doesn't care, because they "deserve it" for not having a job that gives insurance. The ideology is completely backwards, but intentional on the parts of those who profit off it.
Doctors and medical facilities would need to make a lot less money. That is the source of most of the cost difference. The vehicle of payment is maybe a secondary cause. It might be good to change it, but if it's not directly responsible for the majority of the difference in what doctors are getting paid, it's not going to fix the problem.
My Uncle is a doctor, went the full 9 years at Tulane and everything. He had to close his own practice because Medicare paid dirt, insurers would delay payments for years, and malpractice insurance was thousands a month. He was running around a 2,000 a month deficit when he had to fire his secretary and close down. He now works in a general hospital as a surgeon, and is actually happier not having to try to haggle getting paid or getting people to pay more.
Some doctors may be profiting off this, but the principle beneficiary is private insurance companies, at least from my experiences. Doctors spend an eighth of their life learning some of the hardest science and discipline of any profession and you do want to compensate the good ones well. We need more people entering medicine, not fewer.
The overhead of insurance companies are minimal. Less than five percent of the overall spend (edit: this is wrong, it is more like 8%, see [1]).
As much as you prefer to think of your uncle as the good guy and faceless insurance companies as the bad guy, a big part of the problem is he makes between 150% and 200% what his European and Canadian counterparts make. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/how-much-do-doc.... Ahmdahls law makes it nearly inevitable that we'll pay doctors less if we want to reduce our overall costs.
And I'm not saying his practice went under exclusively from insurance companies. And it wasn't how much they were taking, it was more that it took them months to actually pay him for services rendered, and it consumed tons of time to just keep track of who hasn't compensated him yet (besides copays). And medic___ were just as slow.
He might have made it all up, was living it lavishly and just lied about it, but it seems like that would be hard to hide from the extended family. He's had the same car for 8 years now, and his wife works. But he was still a general practice doctor in Augusta that closed his practice and went to work elsewhere for some reason, and if he was making a lot of money, it wasn't showing in how he was living (one house he had for 20 years).
The EU is not a country. The EU has no single healthcare system.
Every country has it's own system, which range from anything between 100% government provided to mostly privatized. No system is the same. And it's not just the EU, it's the entire Western civilization outside the US.
This is extremely important, because the healthcare debate in the US is falsely framed as a choice for or against "socialized medicine", were in reality socialized medicine is a rarity amongst the various healthcare systems.
Whether or not to make quality healthcare accessible to everyone is not an ideological choice, the problem can be solved within the framework of any political ideology.
It's strictly a choice between decent healthcare for everyone or bigger profits for the healthcare industry.
Germany has compulsory health care insurance, Britain has the NHS, New Zealand has a largely free public health care system (with ACC for accident care and private health insurance for those that can afford a slightly higher level of care).
These are all "socialized" schemes of one variety or another, but they all work. You'd get funny looks framing a discussion about health care in those sorts of terms in most of those countries - and the stories shared here sound perverse to anyone in a western democracy outside of the US.
As I understand it, there sort of is the same health care across the EU. There is an EU healthcare card which means any EU citizen gets treated in any EU country. The systems are different, but in the end we can all get healthcare free at the point of delivery. No absurd bill.
The details of how each country does it are different, but the result is the same. No insane bills to stay alive. No poor turned away or treated like second class citizens.
I have to say, of all the things I cant get my head round about the US, the health care system is the biggest jaw dropper for me. Not only is it not universal, but the people who run it make incredible profit out of it. Seems mad to me.
Health care and health care insurance approaches are not the same across the EU, but the EU does proscribe that residents of any EU (1) country insured in one country get medical treatment in any other country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card)
(1) as always, there are zillions of EUs to choose from. Reading the Wikipedia page, it actually isn't the real EU, but the EU plus (all?) members of the EFTA.
If it wasn't for A) getting the same answer for most of my ills: inflammations :p B) The doctor being very busy. C) Basic respect to not stress our medical system. One would go for the tiniest medical complain.