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sc94597 on 30 March 2017
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Pemalite said:

 

You make it sound as if a National healthcare system erodes healthcare quality. It doesn't. I work in the health industry as a Carer looking after the Disabled, Sick and Elderly. I can assure you it's modern, high-quality care. I got a new, modern hostpital for instance:




The USA falters in most of the important statistics. While being more expensive.



The "Higher population" argument is also an invalid one. The costs are done on a per-capita basis, if anything a larger population with a larger amount of patients should give the USA an advantage in the cost statistics, if you have such a large proprtion of the population not paying anything and not accessing your healthcare system, then the per-capita costs are likely higher than the 2.5x of the OECD average for those that are actually paying and using it.
And even if you combined multiple large countries, it still works out superior to that of the US of A.

One size fits all health-care funding erodes health-care quality. The only national system in your infographic is the NHS in the U.K, and it falls behind France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and other countries with multi-payer systems in many ways, such as wait-times, and speciality care. All of the other countries in that infographic have devolved (non-national) systems with a strong dependence on suplementary private care, or private insurance as their main mechanism.

Diseconomies of scale  affect all goods. An example of this in the health-care industry is how the British government has yet to approve P.R.E.P as a covered drug because the potential population is a minority. In a mixed non-nationalized system, like in the United States, one can easily find a company which will cover P.R.E.P. The larger the population, the more likely minority groups with specific health-concerns or conditions will be ignored and unhappy. That is why countries with single-payer tend to either be small, or devolve the funding so that the priorities match the wants of their populations more directly. It is also why private care is promoted in mixed systems (Germany, Japan, France) and mostly private systems (the Netherlands, Switzerland.)

Costs aren't the be all, end all when certain populations are ignored. Nationalized systems are good at providing general care that everybody can make use of, but suck at providing to specialized needs, and that is why you need a strong private or devolved system to either replace or complement it.

Hence why most countries with single-payer don't have nationalized systems, but develoved systems.

One last thing, you can't compare costs on a per-capita basis without considering so many other lurking variables. One to one regressions don't work here, because this is not a single-variable system. When all variables are considered, the argument is less statistically signficant.

Combining "multiple large countries" is doesn't work either, because they are all different with different systems, and the distribution and spending is happening in each country (not for all of them). That is the entire point of economies of scales and diseconomies of scales. Scale factors affect costs.