As an explicit example, my wife took our infant daughter to a doctor the other day, because she was coughing and sneezing for a week already, and she wanted him to confirm that it’s most likely nothing to worry about. The doctor agreed. Insurance was billed $200, with $10 paid by us out of pocket. If we had to pay $200 out of pocket, we’d probably wait another week (and ended up not paying anything at all, because the coughing indeed disappeared before the end of the second week).

People always twist this into “you’d have to pay so much more for healthcare”.

No! I never had to pay anything substantial for healthcare. I pay for insurance. But I prefer private insurance (to improve competition, performance, quality, accessibility, …)

Here's an article on the topic - from a socialist source: https://www.sochealth.co.uk/2015/04/28/weaponizing-the-nhs-i...

'many campaigners who want to “Save” the NHS seem to want to do the opposite – to politicise the NHS so far that reform becomes a practical impossibility. They create alarm about cuts to local services, privatization, postcode lotteries and TTIP. They seem more motivated by anger, and fixated on political totems, than on trying to promote progress within the NHS.'

'The problem with Labour’s campaign to “weaponize” the NHS and turn it into a key political battleground, and its politically motivated and gimmicky manifesto pledges, is that it distracts from the real work that is needed: devolved reforms led by clinicians. We could have yet another 2 year hiatus. The NHS can ill-afford that.'

The kneejerk downvotes on HN are so depressing, especially when they are borne out of ignorance (not you btw, your comment is good).

That seems like the value prop though. The cases where it's not, and the alternatives are absurdly expensive. People seem to be focusing on the median case where it's marginally more expensive or cheaper

To the multiple peers who point out the US uses MBAs too. I'm pointing out that both systems use MBAs and come to the same conclusions such as "We can save n% by using n-1% less effective drug."

Perhaps, but until then, I welcome the value he'd create for us

What would be a good point is a discussion about if want a society where the people who pay for a procedure get better outcomes, or if we're willing to say to those who pay "You will get a worse outcome because we're also serving those who cannot pay. This comes down to cultural values and ethics.

[1] https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/seniors-love-medicare-bu...

There are a variety of different non-state companies providing health insurance in the US, no? What am I missing, how is this a state monopoly?

If either of those are true, their lives do not depend on those procedures.

> because of having the kind of health care system you have in making sure that everyone who needs to be treated is treated

That's completely false, Canada has a presupplied quota system set by government forecasting and limited by budgets. If you need treatment you will be treated eventually but you might die or get sicker in the interim.

Using a COVID-19 based article to discuss the merits of single payer single provider completely ignores the massive cultural mentality differences -- the US focuses on individual freedoms, Canada focuses on collective good. This makes a big difference when it comes to adherence things like social distancing and masks. They're taking a multivariate system and claiming it's a single variable that caused the outcome.

Edit: and I might add that it appears that Canada is always intentionally undersupplied such that a moderate wait is guaranteed. Whereas it seems that due to market competition the US system is inherently oversupplied (at least in many areas) such that they can provide to those who can pay essentially on demand.

I got a "government insurance", which is the most expensive, but also the one with the best cover. There is "private insurances" with cheaper premiums and less cover that are attractive to young people, but it's kind of hard to later in life switch back to the government one.

Most countries in EU have kind of this mixed healthcare, with private, and public ones with the only goal to make sure the private offer competitive enough services... Same thing with hospitals, there is public hospitals, so private ones don't jack up the prices to crazy values...

But anyway, before you attack it - I'm not the one that came up with it - that was the leader of the Labour Party Ed Milliband! It caused a political storm at the time. Clearly the media, political classes etc. did not consider it complete nonsense or they wouldn't have taken it seriously - nor would the government been able to hammer Milliband/the left with it for years.

“Fatter“ and “more often shot” are at least in part due to choices about the focus and distribution of physical and mental health care, not independent factors (in fact, the political faction most defensive of the ways in which the US system differs from the less-expensive, comparable overall outcomes systems in the rest of the developed world also is prone to claiming that the elevated risk of being shot is primarily a product of defects in the health care delivery system, though they tend to lose focus on doing something about those deficiencies quickly after pointing to them.) If you've got evidence that the health impacts of natural disasters are greater—in a way explained by the nature of the disasters alone and not choices in the structure of the health care system—in the US than any, much less all, of the other advanced economies in the OECD, please point it out, because that would be interesting.