Do people 'deserve' universal health care?

[DuncanONeil]

As for your claims of $3000 cost on a $1000 procedure these are wrong as well.

Sorry to disabuse you. But the numbers came from a doctor and a recipient of the procedure. The recipient, without using insurance paid $3,000 for the procedure, for which Medicare pays only $1,000.

What typically happens in the public system is something along the lines of $1200 to $1500 on a $1000 procedure which actually makes money when the administrative overhead is 3% instead of 43%. What happens in the private system is the insurance companies to treat a $1000 procedure as a $2000 one for the purpose of assessing risk as they need that 2 to 1 mark-up to get profits with their huge administrative overhead.

What everyone refuses to acknowledge is that a large part of said overhead is costs that arise as a result of Government leveled requirements. It is estimated that, in total, the cost of everything in this country is 30% due to Government taxes and regulation.

As for wait times, its an issue in a public system, but they are being worked on and are far lower than they were a few years ago. Most procedures have good times now. Also the implication that the US does better on all big issues is outright wrong. The US system if you have money to pay for it does better on some types of cancer, but is near the bottom on all emergency services. Your system does terribly for heart attacks, car accidents and pretty much everything else that requires a quick efficient response. Inability to take people to the fastest reachable hospital causes huge problems, no doubt explaining the fact that the US has one of the highest rates of people dying while on the way to the emergency room.

That is not an issue of health care but an issue of the preferred provider system. That is to say the insurance provider and who accepts them is the driving factor. Hence the reason I assert that the all pervasive cover everything insurance is a detriment to the price of health care.