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darkcreap on 19 July 2015
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I am also Spanish as some other users and visited California for 5 months. I met a girl in a bar who told me she only had one free visit a year to the doctor with Obamacare. I think that the problem in the US is mainly cost-related:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-an-mri-costs-1080-in-america-and-280-in-france/2011/08/25/gIQAVHztoR_blog.html?tid=pm_pop

In Spain we have a public healthcare system that every citizen contributes to with their taxes. The government acts as a great negotiation power that brings the costs down, even for those who have a private insurance in addition to their public insurance. Actually, I have a private insurance "just in case", but I have only used it for my ophthalmology bills and to get psychological treatment due to an anxiety crisis. Both these situations are covered in the public system, but I have had a private doctor since I was little because my mother wanted it to be that way and I took the psychological treatment through private means because I had to wait much longer in the public system and had to travel further than I wanted to. I also have the private insurance just in case I want a double diagnostic.

Nevertheless, for almost everything, I rely on the public system and it works pretty well. I had some kind of pneumonia and had to be in hospital for 3 days. I have read someone in this thread comment that even if you are insured you have to pay part of the cost of your treatment. In Spain, we don't have to pay anything when we receive treatment. That is, we don't pay anything extra apart from income/social security taxes from our monthly wage. When I get insurance I expect the insurance company to pay everything for me.

I think that the main problem in the US is that there is not a lot of negotiation power for insurance companies to take the prices down. If you see the article I link, in Japan prices are taken down by the government if negotiations with suppliers fail. The thing about healthcare is that demand is infinite because there are no alternative products, so, you either buy it or die.