| sc94597 said: Yeah I am familiar with the Australian system on an abstract level. Listened to this podcast that compared two sisters during their maternal care: one who used the private system and the other who used the public one. Pretty decent podcast that gives a good idea about the system in general. https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/impact?selected=VMP1376545152 It is impressive how cost-efficient the health-care systems are in the (non-U.S) Anglosphere, even for developed world standards. Many European countries seem to have either have much higher payroll taxes or higher premiums for the same results. A 2% Medicare levy is less than what Americans pay for Medicare, which is exclusive to 65+ year olds (~19% of the population) and has significant cost-sharing/premiums. Every American worker pays 1.45% of our income for Medicare, and our employers match it. Yet it isn't universal. This is largely because the biggest problem isn't necessarily who pays but the pricing structure. There is a lot of price-discrimination in negotiations between providers/drug-manufacturers and the payors, allowing for producer surplus to be maximized, akin to there being a monopoly and therefore creating a deadweight loss. There is also a lot of price-obscurity, where each hospital/insurer/etc have to employ data teams and pricing analysts or pay an outsourced data company to figure out what the maximum allowable payments should be. Making the system very bureaucratic and cost-inefficient. Basically any universal system would be better from a financial perspective, but seeing people paying 1000 euros/month for health-insurance does make me wonder if some universal systems are better than others. My stance was to just pick the one that required the least political capital to implement, but now I am more hesitant. |
That podcast summarises things well and was surprised they mentioned the death spiral lol. That is true because as I touched on in my original post my health cover started cheap and the plan hasn't changed but realistically it has gone up significantly.
This is partially because the rebate also used to be 30%, which the government used to subsidise and they added means testing to it. So most people on a decent wicket now don't get a rebate so its becomes significantly more than the Medicare levy surcharge, hence why you don't se many young people signup for private health anymore. If the rebate stayed I think more people would take it up again as it is nice to be able to have certain surgeries without having to wait for them in the public system.
