I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd pick American healthcare over mine most of the time. You guys have so many more treatment options available.
Ours is the one where you end up with one hundred bills from a twenty different providers, fighting insurance & hospital billing departments for a hundred plus hours on the phone, and five-figures of out of pocket expenses for a completely normal pregnancy & birth of a child, if you've got decent insurance. It holds back entrepreneurship, and it threatens to take all the money you've saved up, at any time. Inheritance? The hospitals will get it before you do. Your savings for retirement? You're just holding on to it before the hospitals eventually get it. Maybe your kid gets seriously sick and then you just don't retire ever. Freedom! Choice!
It's a huge source of risk and anxiety even if you have insurance. The extreme budgeting uncertainty and stress are hard to put in dollar terms, but they're expensive, on top of what's already the most expensive system around, and getting more expensive at something like double the inflation rate. It's inhumane and unsustainable. If it blew every other system out of the water it might, might be worth all that, but it doesn't, so it isn't, at all.
Presumably you’d only pick it if you had insurance and income to pay for those services. Not if you’re one of 30 or so million without insurance, and I’m not sure how many million more who are underinsured and can’t afford the deductibles. So you can avoid ending up being one of the 40,000 or so Americans that die each year from lack of healthcare access.
Well, you still have to pay a bit out of pocket here. I've been unable to get asthma medication in the past due to cost. I've also had no insurance at all, because it's not actually universal. In fact, right now I've been without an inhaler for a while and won't have one for a long time to come. But I guess this would be no different in the American healthcare system.
I agree though that the American system makes people feel insecure, but on the other hand, you guys can get treated for things like ADHD much more easily if you can afford it.
All I'm trying to say is that it's not sunshine and rainbows in every other OECD country. It might be in others, but not mine.
I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd pick American healthcare over mine most of the time.
I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd prefer my health system to America's, any time.
A&E might be a pain the arse, sure, but an agonising life of medical debt - that I can't hope to pay-off any time in the near future - is a worse fate, I feel.
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I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd pick American healthcare over mine most of the time. You guys have so many more treatment options available.
Ours is the one where you end up with one hundred bills from a twenty different providers, fighting insurance & hospital billing departments for a hundred plus hours on the phone, and five-figures of out of pocket expenses for a completely normal pregnancy & birth of a child, if you've got decent insurance. It holds back entrepreneurship, and it threatens to take all the money you've saved up, at any time. Inheritance? The hospitals will get it before you do. Your savings for retirement? You're just holding on to it before the hospitals eventually get it. Maybe your kid gets seriously sick and then you just don't retire ever. Freedom! Choice!
It's a huge source of risk and anxiety even if you have insurance. The extreme budgeting uncertainty and stress are hard to put in dollar terms, but they're expensive, on top of what's already the most expensive system around, and getting more expensive at something like double the inflation rate. It's inhumane and unsustainable. If it blew every other system out of the water it might, might be worth all that, but it doesn't, so it isn't, at all.
And yet the U S has a higher birth rate and more entrepreneurs than Europe. Can't be that bad.
What the hell do those have to do with health care?
Presumably you’d only pick it if you had insurance and income to pay for those services. Not if you’re one of 30 or so million without insurance, and I’m not sure how many million more who are underinsured and can’t afford the deductibles. So you can avoid ending up being one of the 40,000 or so Americans that die each year from lack of healthcare access.
Well, you still have to pay a bit out of pocket here. I've been unable to get asthma medication in the past due to cost. I've also had no insurance at all, because it's not actually universal. In fact, right now I've been without an inhaler for a while and won't have one for a long time to come. But I guess this would be no different in the American healthcare system.
I agree though that the American system makes people feel insecure, but on the other hand, you guys can get treated for things like ADHD much more easily if you can afford it.
All I'm trying to say is that it's not sunshine and rainbows in every other OECD country. It might be in others, but not mine.
I'm in one of the other OECD states and I'd prefer my health system to America's, any time.
A&E might be a pain the arse, sure, but an agonising life of medical debt - that I can't hope to pay-off any time in the near future - is a worse fate, I feel.
Sure, but the comment I'm replying to argued that all the other OECD countries are better at it than the US.