Quote:There is nothing stopping politicians getting advice from the private sector, or from other successful public health systems in the world. Hey, a fully public system works very well in the UK while spending way less money per capita on healthcare than the US.

 

The problem I see with your system is you have tried to enact universal healthcare whilst working in the constraints of the previous failed model.

 

A friend of mine works as a private consultant in healthcare here and knows different models of care in countries upside down. The US model is seen as one of the worst least efficient models of health in the developed world, whilst the fully public British model is seen as the system best to learn from.

 

How did this get in a Milwaukee race riot thread?


NHS has their own problems though.  Having financial difficulties.  Deny patients care.  Starting to suffer from even longer wait times.  etc...  there are pro's and con's with all systems.  Plus they arent great at a lot of specialties.  Their healthcare system is similar to our schooling model.  Everyone pays taxes but if your public school is lousy, you pay for private if you can afford it.  Which is what people in England do.  Something like 10-15% pay for private insurance because the NHS just doesnt pay for a number of specialties.  Not economically feasible.  And a great number of NHS specialists moonlight as private pay physicians in order to make enough money.  Without the private insurance, the NHS would have huge difficulties.  Or they'd just flat out deny a lot of specialty care.

 

There was a really good PBS episode on Frontline called "Sick around the World".  Basically some guy went to 5 or 6 countries around the world, looked at their healthcare system, and determined what we could learn here in America.  England, Germany, Switzerland, Japan.... Taiwain i believe...think he went to Canada.  Anyways I'm not sure anyone here is dorky enough to go, but the guy came to talk at UNF a few years ago at their "international public policy lecture" series thingy do.  Pretty interesting.  Lots of pro's and cons with every model.  Think that frontline episode can be found online still.

 

The one thing I feel like doesnt get enough press when we talk about healthcare is our unhealthy population.  Put our demographic in these other countries' healthcare systems and they'd absolutely collapse.  In Japan for example, it's part of their culture to just stop by their general practitioner for a quick check up on their way to work.  Or on the way to dinner.  Very health conscious.  Eat very healthy.  Very low healthcare costs.  Their model simply wouldnt work for us because we have a completely different patient population.  We could institute the most generous health insurance policies in the world but are JimBob and Ray Ray gonna all of a sudden stop off for their weekly blood pressure check before swinging by McDonalds for lunch?  Not a chance.  Huge difference between health care and health insurance.

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