(04-24-2019, 11:40 AM)mikesez Wrote: I'll give just an anecdote, because I haven't found data.
I know a person who got one knee replaced at age 63 and one at age 65.
The first was before she qualified for Medicare, the second was after.
The first one cost her almost $15,000 out of pocket and took about two months from calling the surgeon to going under the knife. 
She needed the second one pretty much right away, but decided to wait for her 65th birthday because she knew that put of pocket costs would be much lower with medicare.
She'd tell you that the wait time for her second knee surgery was only two weeks.  But I would say it was more like two years.
What do you think?

What data are you looking for? It is well known that with public healthcare, wait times go up. Limited specialists and a large patient pool lead to huge wait times to see a general practitioner, diagnostic testing, then a referral to see a specialist for consultation, now deciding best treatment plan, and finally the procedure. This is a seperate issue from the continual rising cost not only from the government but out of pocket. Why do we continualyl gripe about how the US spends the most of any country on healthcare but fail to look at the why? The large costs rest at the feet of Medicare and Medicaid which are the largest chunk of federal spending by far, even without trying to expand it to everyone. Not sustainable even now! The fact of the matter is the Americans look at health insurance like car insurance and don't find it necessary until it is. We'll spend hundreds if not thousands on cell phones and data plans but not on a health plan. Anyways, take your pick of whatever other countries program that includes a large percentage of socialized medicine and there has been a study on it with data that you can comb over. Here are a few links to breeze through...

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/...anada-2017

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/...b4a03d36b8

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10...6817693599

https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/03/fi...rdest-hit/

https://www.cagw.org/thewastewatcher/med...yrocketing

http://hr.cch.com/hld/696264Voluntaryand...models.pdf

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