Virtually every civilized nation in the world today has some form of socialized medicine. Bring this topic up in most any forum in the USA and you can guarantee that someone will stand up and loudly protest, without ever having visited one of those countries or used their healthcare systems, that such systems are broken and deny people the medical help they need.
That's interesting because it occurs to me that the current US healthcare system is broken and denies people the medical help they need. Anyone burdened with an HMO plan knows that you have to make a visit to your primary care physician (at both financial expense and cost of your time) in order to get a referral to a specialist (which then entails additional expense of money and time). Need to see a specialist? You have to take two days off work and pay two office visit copays to do it. By comparison there is no such requirement in Canada or the UK where you go to see whichever doctor can help you.
Opponents of social healthcare claim that people wait days, weeks and sometimes months to get in to see a doctor in Canada or the UK. The last time I called my doctor here in the States I had to wait a week for an appointment. Scheduling a dentist visit is a delicate balancing act of which month they have an opening and whether I believe that far in advance that I'll be able to take time off work. When my mother has gone in for lab work she has frequently waited in the lobby for over an hour only to be left waiting in a room for another half hour before someone could see her.
Here in the USA my mother pays over $200 a month for her health insurance and yet she still has a $35 copay for an office visit and, thanks to a quirk in the coverage, it costs her more under the insurance to buy the medication she needs than it does for her to pay for it herself without going through the insurance provider. In effect she is paying over $200 a month just to be able to say that she has insurance. It isn't actually doing anything for her. Further, as she gets older and nears retirement when she will be making no income whatsoever, her insurance premiums continue to rise. The end result; if she wishes to remain insured she can never afford to retire.
In Canada and the UK people pay literally nothing for most medications and might pay as high as $10 for some obscure medications. Here in the USA I have what I consider to be pretty good health coverage and my minimum out of pocket payment for a generic medication is $15. I am paying 50% more in addition to my monthly premiums. My aforementioned mother pays around $60 for her prescription (the one her insurance provider would charge her more for if she bought it on insurance). Doing the math, $10 versus $60 means someone in Canada can buy six times the amount of the medicine. If this is a medication they need to be on for the rest of their life doesn't it seem better to be able to afford it for six times as long?
This brings up the ages old argument that peoples' taxes in these other countries are much higher than ours. I think I've heard that in the worst taxation in British history in the 1970s some people paid as much as 50% of their income in taxes. Yowch! I sure wouldn't want to live like that. But how much of my income is taxed here in the USA? Every dollar I earn is taxed (I believe right now it's around 15% taxation). When I spend my already taxed income I am taxed again (income tax) of 8% in Southern California. Every dollar I earned and spent has a value of only 78 cents after this double taxation; that's a 22% tax in case you were wondering. Now on top of this I pay $66 a month for my health insurance (my employer generously picks up the rest). This is another 4% of my income which I don't see and which goes directly to my health insurance, so we're now up to 26% taxation. If, like my mother, my employer was not picking up the bulk of my health insurance this figure would be significantly higher (more like 36%).
So now, where is this horrible problem with social healthcare causing high taxes? It seems to me that what people are forgetting is that when you have the high taxes in Canada or the UK, you are not also paying for your healthcare; it's already been covered. I would surely protest if I were being taxed at 36% and paying $200 a month out of pocket for my health insurance. This is not how it works in social healthcare systems, however, and I see no reason to believe that my net income would be substantially less if I were living in such a place. In fact, when I needed more than just the bare minimum health care (if I were involved in an accident or needed surgery or medication) my net income would be higher in such a country since I would not be paying $35 for a copayment plus $15 per medication plus the 20% or whatever that my insurance doesn't cover of hospital stay. Here in the USA it is easy for someone to literally go broke if they need emergency services. In the UK, Canada, China, Cuba, France and dozens of other countries there is no such worry. Emergency services are covered just like office visits and medication -- it's already been paid for.
But damn those countries all around the world with their horribly broken social healthcare! Damn them and their commie, un-American ideas! Those poor, pitiful fools don't know what they're missing with HMOs and PPOs and other inhumane systems that we US citizens enjoy. Ha ha ha ha! They'll never be able to be gouged or denied medicine they need to survive. I feel really sorry for them having to live healthier, longer lives.
©1996, 2008 by Don K. Eitner