I think that would be progress, in a way. Too many people here are stuck in “I’ve got mine, so screw you” mindset.
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Pretty much. And while I am not a huge guy (6’2"), and not enormous (200lbs, I need to drop more, but even my doc is okay with it) my head is wide. Glasses usually don’t fit at all, and the last time I could wear a hat was in high school.
Ironically for a guy with a big head, I’m still a moran.
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I know the trope is every American liberal wants to move to Canada. But… It isn’t outside my frame of reference.
The bay area is amazing. It is vibrant, exciting, and extremely high energy. But I paid $45 for a five mile cab ride the other night.
The driver turned off the meter while I was watching. However you have to pick your fights.
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I’m not sure how that has anything to do with medical costs, but I assure you, you’re not the only area with crazily expensive (and corrupt) cabs. SF taxies ARE horrible, though, that’s the area that pushed me into ridesharing in the first place, in fact.
Having worked for a SF company for so many years, I remember when the setup the canadian subsidiary they thought I typoed when I told them what the supplementary health care cost would be per employee here. “Per month?” “No, per year”. “You sure you got that right?!”
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While the rhetorical effect of having a Gummint HMO is undeniably extreme in the American context(just look at how much play ‘death panels’ got, despite the ACA actually being less death-panel-tastic than prior); the change would probably be less dramatic in practice than it would be in terminology.
While the HMOs and the PPOs and various other flavors of ‘managed care’ differ in assorted arcane details; HMOs or other flavors of insurance that look pretty HMO-like to the user(even if they differ in terms of provider compensation schemes; or don’t require a designated PCP but do require preauthorization for basically everything except a case of the sniffles) are the substantial majority of the American insurance market(exact numbers seem to depend on who you ask and where exactly you draw the line; but it’s north of 75% and some put it at more like 90%); and the main benefit of a glorious free market HMO is that what is ‘in network’ will be smaller and more confusing; and you get told to fuck off and die by your HMO’s preferred claim evaluation contractors rather than a bureaucrat.
When you combine this with the substantial practical limits on customer choice of insurance(among people who are insured; a pretty substantial portion of them are only going to switch insurers if they change jobs or their spouse’s options for family-plan coverage end up being better than theirs); the ‘market’ for insurance, such as it is, isn’t really between end users and insurance companies, so it’s not as though there being multiple insurance companies translates into any meaningful chance to get pissed off and take your business elsewhere(especially if you’ve discovered the limits of your current provider in the course of being an expensive and undesirable sickie; changing insurance doesn’t get easier if you want to preserve continuity of care and/or if the only thing keeping the insurers you inquire about from kicking you and your preexisting condition out of their office is the fact that doing so overtly isn’t legal).
If American healthcare actually involved free market elements (aside from shareholders with a direct incentive to ensure that the delta between the premiums you pay and the cost of the care you receive is as favorable as possible; we have that) rather than being a dysfunctional cosplay of something resembling a free market, people might consider the possibility of greater government involvement to be a huge shift.
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I am a proud Canadian taxpayer, net contributor to the system. Were my parents American, I would not have been fucking born, because no insurance company would have covered my mother due to pre-existing conditions and the birth of my older sister would have wiped them out. I struggle all the time to understand how people in the US have gone along with this system for so long.
And don’t get me started with that Trick Pony that Republicans trot out all the time with some Brad or Suzie Middleclass who paid for a procedure in the US because the wait list up here was too long. That rant is an epic one because it is a trick.
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Yes, my dad was such an asshole for not keeping his job while he was dying of cancer.
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Normally I don’t respond to obvious trollies (welcome to Boingboing, comrade!) but it’s worth pointing out, in case anyone else reading this believes this obvious lie, that the top 10 countries in the world for labour force participation rate all have heavily-subsidised government-run healthcare. The US, meanwhile, is just about beating Namibia and Slovenia.
This data comes from directly from the OECD:
Although of course, OECD statisticians are clearly just a bunch of communists trying to undermine Murican freedom, right? 
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So glad not to be American.
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By not shovelling billions of public dollars into the profits of parasitic private health insurance corporations.
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If I were American, my parents would have been bankrupted by my premature birth. Then bankrupted again when my skull was fractured at six months.
Then again when I fell off the bridge, and again when I fell down the stairs, and again when I was hit with that baseball bat. And then there’s the tonsillectomy.
If I’d somehow lived through all that, I would’ve been wiped out when my self-inflicted stupidity put me in hospital for a week during grad school.
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I can’t even bring myself to issue the requisite Lucille; any attempt to address it would likely end up being eaten, as I would be unable to contain my contempt.
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Healthcare alone was enough to remove America from the list of acceptable countries when I was considering overseas academic positions.
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Since you think personal anecdotes are acceptable data I’ll share this one: a friend of mine had her very expensive insurance plan that she’d had for years cut off when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Let me put that more clearly: she lost all the money she’d been paying into the insurance program when she needed it most. She then could not get insurance because her cancer was a “pre-existing condition”.
The Affordable Care Act changed that. She was able to get insurance again and begin treatment, although it was temporarily stopped when the Republican governor of the state where she lived tried to block implementation of the ACA.
I know it’s futile to tell you this, but I’m putting it out there in the hopes that those who are genuinely interested in the facts will consider it.
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Well, everyone else has covered the meaty arguments, so I’ll just say: yes.
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It seems that way to us, but let me use an analogy: We could house all Canadians and reduce their housing costs enormously. Demolish all the houses, build single-plan apartment buildings only, and allocate apartment size by number of family members. We up the taxes to pay for it, of course, but you don’t have to worry about housing costs, you have home security, and most importantly of all, all Canadians are now housed, and no-one lives in fear about how to make their next rent payment.
Why don’t we? Why is this considered absurd? Because housing is an area that we believe you should be able to purchase higher quality - it is a reward for being economically productive. Moreover, restricting one’s right to to purchase better housing would seem outrageous.
Health-care is considered by a lot of Americans to be in the same mental box as housing. Needed (so there are a patchwork of systems to help the poor), but something that gets better as you move up the chain.
Having looked at the others, and perfectly aware I am biased by my experience, I’d still go with the Canadian system.
Of course! But then, I think it’s criminally underreported about how important it is to get travel insurance when going to another province. If you are very unlucky and need a procedure that is covered in one province, but reimbursed vastly less elsewhere, you can be up the creek without a paddle.
Well, there’s heavy selection bias on my part, but I’ve rarely found that among the Americans that I’ve talked to for any length (and not more so than Canadians).
I feel the desire to not reduce their health-care services at all (which at upper-middle-class levels are superior to what you’d get in the Canadian system (timelier and more care, and marginally better health outcomes) motivates much of the resistance to change.
A beautiful paragraph and worth quoting! But like most big changes, what matters is culture, not the reality. I mean, yes, we have death panels and waiting lists. But our health-care outcomes are not vastly different.
While I love the dry inter-country, inter-hospital comparisons of outcomes (because hospitals don’t need a pat “this system is better”, they all want to improve outcomes), this isn’t what changes minds in the voting populace. And since we live in a democracy…
Actually, that’s another advantage of the Canadian system. People here can point at health-care, which almost everyone has consumed, and feel that that is something worthy paid for by their taxes. Even though health-care doesn’t consume that much of our tax dollars (a lot, but by no means the majority), the psychological effect is to make Canadians as a whole a lot less averse than Americans to taxes (including taxes that are not involved in health-care at all…)
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Really. Each one of these things cost us ~$2.1B in today’s dollars:
And tell me again about sub-billionaire trump’s taxes, again? How much did he put toward American healthcare? The number is round with a hole in the center: 0
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But you can purchase better health care in Canada. It’s not restricted. My workplace pays for physiotherapy, and dentistry, and prescription drugs, and all sorts of things that Medicare doesn’t pay for. Medicare isn’t restricting the ability for people to pay for better health care; it’s just paying for the baseline care that keeps everyone reasonably healthy.
A similar initiative, to ensure that everyone has at least the baseline level of housing, is not particularly considered to be outrageous.
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I feel obliged to note here that, in Australia and most other places with socialised medicine, you can buy superior medicine if you want to.
Skipping waiting lists, elective surgery, luxury treatment: all available to those with the cash to pay.
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I think the way to spin the argument to the temporarily-not-millionaires-but-someday types down here is that private health insurance will also be available, so those who want to distinguish themselves from the plebs with their government HMO options can lord it over them with all the extra options they get by being able to afford Cadillac coverage.
(Don’t get me started on what I think about the U.S. obsession with Cadillacs as some sort of measure of excellence and class.)
Edit: I see several others have made the point about being able to purchase additional coverage. Still, I’ll keep my post here because my point is about implementation: to sell single-payer here, we need to appeal to the class prejudices already in existence.
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