
Originally Posted by
Lord of the Fraud
You think the citizens of those countries lead a poorer lifestyle than your average American?
And discounting illegals. Why can't the richest country in the world have free health care for all?
Having insurance companies making huge bank from healthcare is very difficult for those of us on the outside (with free healthcare) to understand.
Without even getting into the reasons why socialized medicine sucks, I'll cover it from an even simpler standpoint.
The US has a problem that other countries do not -- simply that health care has become tremendously overpriced.
Current proposals in the US for socialized care would simply shift the bill from the patients and insurance companies to the government. Costs will still be ridiculously high, but the bill will just be shifted to Uncle Sam (the taxpayers). In fact, it would get even WORSE, because utilization would be much higher (due to everything being "free").
Idiot liberals like to spout nonsense such as, "Take insurance company profits and marketing expenses out, and we will save a ton of money, and everything will be much cheaper!", but that's completely misunderstanding where the money in health care has been going. Insurance company profits and marketing overhead are a drop in the bucket compared to overall health care costs in the US.
The problem here is that the costs are outrageously high, and no one is proposing anything effective to do anything about it. Instead, we have endless debates as to who pays for it. That's where our core mistake is.
Once we get costs, fraud, and waste under control, then we can talk about who pays for it.