Hiku said:
Aeolus451 said:
I believe that the majority of healthcare is a service and sickly people are not entitled to it at the expense of everyone. No one is stopping you from making more money to buy what you want. Change plans or something. I do need some stuff done that's expensive but I don't think I'm entitled to it at no cost to me. Life saving treatments/meds/procedure are the only things I consider that people have an entitlement with at low cost.
In my opinion, insurance companies are the main contributing factor in why healthcare is so expensive. I think the healthcare insurance system needs to be reworked to reduce the costs and change what's covered or done away with completely. Maybe replace it with a cash only/affordable financing for expensive treatments. I noticed that most of the meds/treatments not covered by insurance are priced reasonably. I completely disagree with UHC. Just because some people are doing something doesn't make it the smart or right choice.
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You seem to have an inaccurate impression of what UHC does.
"but I don't think I'm entitled to it at no cost to me"
That's not how it works. Where did you hear this?
In Sweden, our medicine only gets subsidized to $0 for the rest of the year once we've paid up to a certain cap during that year. In this case it's $225 USD. Once you pay $225 for medicine during a year, you get it for free for the rest of the year. Before that it gets gradually subsidized until it finally reaches 0.
There's no "at no cost to me."
The vast majority of people will not need to spend more than $225 a year for prescription medicine. And this is NOT including costs of doctors visits, which is treated a a separate expense.
Even though doctors visits are significantly cheaper than they can be in the US, at no point do people feel like they're not losing money by visiting a doctor.
So no one in my family has EVER visited a doctor due to a cold or the flue. Nor has anyone even gotten a flu shot.
Some of you seem to think that people just rush down to the hospital 10 times a week and pop pills like it's candy from a pez dispenser because of UHC. That's not reality.
The reality is that it still costs people money. But if it at any point gets so expensive that you can't afford it, you can ask the government to fund it for you if you can prove your lack of finances.
I do at least appreciate that you think life saving treatments should be "cheap". But rather than cheap, it should be that everyone is guaranteed to be able to afford it.
And the primary reason for why USA healthcare is so expensive is undoubtedly because the government cant negotiate drug prices. How else do you explain that the same US manufactured drugs can be bought for 3-5 times cheaper in Canada? The insurance companies are not behind that.
As for "Just because some people are doing something doesn't make it the smart or right choice", by "some people" you mean literally everyone else. At least when we're talking industrialized nations. Japan, Australia, UK, Germany, Canada, Finland, Spain, Sweden, etc.
So don't say "some people". Use the actual term. Every other industrialized nation.
And if what the majority of what people want doesn't constitute right or wrong, consider how much money the pharmaceutical industry would spend to convince Americans that they don't deserve what's best for them, when they're allowed to set prices at any rates they chose, which is not a normal thing anywhere else on the planet.
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Every single country on that list is either subsidized directly through foreign aid or a beneficiary of the unbalanced NATO, NAFTA and UN protections provided by the one country that doesn't have a wholly socialized medical system.
As for the drug prices, it is precisely because other countries' price controls that Americans pay more. They have to make up for lost revenue somewhere and they do that by upcharging us to subsidize foreign countries socialist policies. Sure we could implement price controls (though it'd most likely result in a successful challenge in the courts) or other countries could stop, once again, shoving it to us Americans by paying for their own socialism. It also stands to reason that if the US did resort to pricing controls that the cost of Canada's drugs (for example) would go up in cost to the consumer.
