That’s an obvious conclusion, but it turns out you’re wrong. In the UK nurses wages start at £7.88 per hour, to compare, minmum wage is £7.50. (source)
Doctors get paid more: “If you’re working as a specialty doctor you’ll earn a basic salary of £37,923 to £70,718.” (source)
And yet somehow people still sign up to become nurses, (Of course, many less now that brexit is starting to sink it’s claws in). Some people just want to help others, even if the pay is crap and the hours are worse.
Anyway, given that the US manages to spend twice the per capita amount than Japan, for almost certainly a worse standard of care, there’s deffenitely some efficiencies to a normal health care system that the US’s ‘insurance only’ system doesn’t have.
That’s a good example of the greed-grounded difference between a smart wealthy American capitalist and a stupid one.
Henry Ford, for all his other despicable characteristics, at least understood that he had to pay his employees enough to eventually buy his product. More germane to this discussion, Henry Kaiser set up the progenitor of today’s corporate health insurance plan at what was at the time a low cost to employees and leveraged it during the WWII domestic labour shortage as a means of retaining skilled workers in their shipbuilding and other industries. Both Henrys managed to become spectacularly wealthy despite policies which went (slightly) away from zero-sum outcome.
In contrast, conservative American capitalists today have great difficulty conceiving of a nation-wide health insurance system that doesn’t put profits in the pockets of a handful of private shareholders and executives or imagine a medical professional who isn’t in it for the money (hint: avoid physicians who did get into the career for the money).
It’s a true failure of imagination and education and critical thinking, not to mention a willful blindness to insurance systems elsewhere in the industrialised West that have operated with better or at least equal health care outcomes at lower financial and social costs.
I think most forgot that Otto Von Bismarck instituted a welfare state in the German Empire to impede the growth of the labor unions and communists. And surprisingly it worked pretty well. I’m not for any kind of reformism myself but when it comes down to the basic idea of how should a ruler handle those whom they rule over they should take a note from Bismarck at very least on the welfare issue. Otherwise, you’re going to raise a generation of anarchists (me) and socialists/communists as it seems the polls are showing among Millennials. So I’m all for the capitalists cutting of their own nose to spite their face. It just makes my job easier.
And recruitment has been a problem in the NHS for years. Even pre-Brexit.
That’s why NHS hospitals were full of doctors and nurses from other EU countries - because Brits weren’t prepared to take the jobs and/or we weren’t prepared to train them in sufficient numbers since we could hire already trained staff from the rest of world for less than it would cost to train Brits (both being different sides of the same coin).
You’re right that there will always be some who want to help others.
lollipop_jones isn’t wrong about the difficulties in reducing healthcare spending.
He does leave out the obvious but politically impossible (so far at least) option of solving the problem if we don’t want to reduce the standard of care - don’t reduce spending, instead spend the money needed and raise taxes/contributions to fund it.
And that is fine, provided we make sure we plan to raise enough money, and show the up front computations of who will pay it and how much. That’s where Obamacare went wrong - too much book-cooking in the projections.
I’m not going to argue that a national health coverage program is necessarily going to turn the USA into a stalinist hellhole. Germany for example does pretty well and offers lots of freedom of choice.
What bothers me about a national health plan in this country is our government’s track record of massively underestimating the costs of every health program it creates. Sometimes by an order of magnitude. Over and over again.
(edit) There are many single payer advocates who claim that we can give the American public the health care they need, while increasing coverage, and lowering costs. And there are scenarios in which that might be true.
However, Americans are more focused not on what they need, but on what they want. Not at all the same thing, and health care wonks ignore this at their peril.
Amen! I know people who are dead because they were too poor to go to a doctor… they just got sicker until they died.
If they had lived in Europe they would be alive today.
Yes, 1000%. Decoupling health care from employment would be enormously trans-formative. (In some ways that would be considered virtuous from an (libertarian-ish?) economic perspective).
How many people are staying in jobs they hate - and would leave if they weren’t depending on it for that what-if-I-get-really-sick scenario? (Sure, some businesses would suffer from retainment issues, if so they can either up their value proposition to their employees, or get selected out of the market).
How much entrepreneurial energy would be freed up if folks could build their dream businesses without an existential threat looming over them?
There appears to be no shortage of ideas on how we can fund a national health plan by taxing the 1%, and by cutting only those costs associated with greedy executives and stockholders.
While politically tempting, these proposals are not math-friendly.
There is no national health plan in any developed country which works that way. All of them tax heavily well down into the middle class, and all of them ration services in one way or another.
I can agree that a universal health care plan does have some freedom supporting benefits. What I insist on is only that: the numbers be actuarily sound, with patient care expenses based on recent historical experience for the US population, and that the plan be presented honestly, with full details about funding and about any constraints on coverage of tests and procedures.
I am not concerned about “death panels” as I am about “quality of life panels” in which patients are told that instead of a hip replacement, they will be given physical therapy and Tylenol.
Medicare was already heading in that direction by providing financial disincentives for physicians and hospitals to take on higher risk patients for elective surgery - fortunately this has now been suspended.
