Someone pays. Thats the funny thing, you pay 2 or 3x more per capita than other countries while only covering part of your population.
I'm pretty sure I already acknowledged the payment system was horribly inefficient. However, we pay that 2 or 3x you refer to for health care, not for insurance coverage. People get care, whether they are covered or not.
Okay, so you probably do better than Zimbabwe. Is that your benchmark? Try Cuba.
I can only presume you live in one of those six countries. Otherwise your argument about quality of care would be moot. Which one?
So what, the bigger the scale, the more efficient you could make it.
The point wasn't of scale. The point was our "costs" you keep referring to include paying for free healthcare for illegal immigrant populations the size of the countries you are referring to. But you knew that. We are obviously such bastards that way.
If you can do it on a scale as small as that, surely you could do it on a state level in the US?
We have universal care in Massachusetts. The other 49 haven't expressed interest. But if it works out there others may take notice. Interestingly the folks in Massachusetts were pretty strongly against the latest federal plan.
Yeah those cliches again. While they may have some truth, they dont explain the results. Read the article. US smokes a whole lot less than europeans, and you are younger. I also dont think your babies are born fat, so how do you explain child mortality?
We eat more then you smoke. And curiously, smoking seems to kill people less expensively than obesity. (tongue in cheek)
But curiously, have you looked at our birthrates by demographic group? Unlike Europeans that simply don't breed at all. In the US the poor out breed the rich by quite some margin. And if you saw the kids you would see that many are indeed born fat or at least get that way remarkably quickly.
But even so you may find that is not such a scandal as you are led to believe.
Cool Graph The lines are actually all pretty close together. If you figure that many of our births come from recent Mexican immigrants, the numbers start to make a little more sense.
By the way, I'm quite certain you will find we die in more car crashes (because we drive 10 fold more than Europeans). We also have many different types of "death by misadventure". Sometimes crazy people drown their kids in cars. Other times teenagers shoot each other. Mostly this excess mortality isn't a result of a poor medical care. It's because lots of us are a bit less "civilized" then in other countries.
Anyway, its your health and your tax dollars. If you are happy spending 3x more for worse quality just so you dont have to call something "socialist", then thats your choice. Im sure happy with my healthcare system and I dont care what you call it.
I'm also pretty happy with my healthcare system, my costs, and the results I receive. I wouldn't switch places with anyone. However, I don't remember calling anything socialist.