L233 said:
If I feel sick and I have to wait more than 3-4 days to see a doctor, I would be extremely angry.
I really wonder where you get your information. If I feel sick, I walk into the next physician's office. I never had to wait more than 1h, even without an appointment. 3-4 days? Huh?
I don't wait that long, your socialized medicine does. I get same day appointments as I mentioned over and over, usually with my own doctor. Yeah, sure, if I wanted to, I could walk into a clinic, but I prefer a private physician. Do you have a private room?
And if there's a real emergency, ambulance response time is 15 minutes maximum, usually much faster in urban areas. IIRC, the _average_ response time in the USA is higher than the maximum response time required by law in Germany.
Bullshit. Average response time in the US is 8-12 minutes across a nation far larger than Germany with much lower population density (1/4 the population density). US EMS responders have to deal with a much larger geographical disadvantage, as Americans live spread out over vast distances with the exception of urban areas. Where I live, average EMS response is 7 minutes. In Santa Barbara, it's 5 minutes.
That's awfully nice but that figure alone isn't conclusive. Were those cases with long wait times critical? I doubt it. Why the arbitrary 12 weeks? Does that time frame have any particular significance? Is it even relevant?
That's what the study chose: 3 month waits. Why is it surprising? America is an obese nation, and if anyone should be adept at treating lifestyle diseases like heart disease, it would be us. My mom had a heart attack in July of 1991. Within 8 minutes, an EMS unit responed. Within 20 minutes, they had state-of-the-art beta blockers, anti-coagulants, and blood thinners in her. The result was very little damage to her heart. As soon as she was well enough, she got angioplasty. She's been problem free for 12 years now.
What makes you think that the US system is less bureaucratic? What makes you think that there is more effective price control? Or is it the good old "public sector works inefficiently" truism?
I get my care from the Stanford Medical system. I only had to fill out a web-based form once. I have never touched a piece of paper since then. I only get notices in e-mail, which are automatically paid by my employer. Whenever I need care, I just give my SMC #. I can make appointments online too. When my doctor has finished my checkup, if I need prescription drugs, their system *automatically* faxes my prescription to a pharmacist so that it is ready to be picked up when I leave. After my blood work was done, I got a PDF in email with the result.
Your data is from a pre-new-economy 1991 era before Health Information Systems became a hot industry, and your link was put out by a group lobbying for socialized care. The truth is that red-tape varies depending on which system you choose. But atleast I have a choice. Stick to OECD reports which are alot more balanced and non-partisan.
The argument that money is spent on customer retention and acquisition (e.g. marketing) is irrelevent. If I accept that argument, I may as well accept the nationalization of every industry so we can eliminate "wasted" marketing costs. Why do we need ATI and NVidia or AMD and Intel, think how much cheaper life could be with one vendor for every service. One phone company, one computer company. No commercials. Sounds like Utopia.
Health care isn't a commodity, and service does matter. With a socialized program, you have *no recourse* if you have problems, except to organize a massive political campaign to try and change it. Perhaps by the time your grandkids are adults, you will have succeeded. Just go look at the NHS of the UK. I can choose my insurance based on what I want insured. Apparently, in Germany too, you can get private insurnance. I guess the state system isn't covering everything that people want, and if you earn more than a certain amount, you go can live with a two-tiered system.
Personally, I prefer the US approach: health care provided by employer, with the government picking up the slack for unemployed, disabled, retired, or elderly. Just like I prefer private retirement funds to social security. My own bank account rather than a government payout.
The only reason Germany isn't as screwed up as other socialized medicine countries is because Germany is also one of the largest spenders. 10.9% of GDP right after the US's 13.9%. But other nations in large part, are being subsidized by the huge investments being made in the US on capital equipment and new technology, technology which is initially expensive for early adopters, but cheaper after it "trickes down" to countries with bureaucratically controlled spending. Someone has to be buying these new machines when they come out, otherwise, they don't become main stream.
I personally don't care about "cost containment" of health care. The demand for this good is infinite. I will pay an arbitrary amount of my income and wealth if it means gains in my longevity. Let's say that when I'm 70 years old, I can by tissue-engineering-grown-replacement-hearts, but they cost $100,000 per person due to difficultly of manufacturing. I will pay this amount, whether or not, my socialist medical provider wants to cover it. I will sell my house to pay for a fountain of youth in my 70s.
As the population continues to get older, and birth rates go down, health care spending will continue to rise, period. It will not be stabilized, no matter how Orwellian your socialist solution. Eventually, if the other amenities of life: food, water, electricity, entertainment, transportation, become so cheap as to not matter, I could forsee healthcare taking up 90% of GDP spending on an elderly population.
