._.

Universal health care that guarantees a certain basic level of health care access is the most cost effective system. it doesn't guarantee gold plated health care for all, but it does guarantee a minimum level of health care. Once that universal guaranteee is in place then you can let the free market run rampant on those who want to buy better healthcare, while leaving alone those who are willing to settle for the minimum. Having a minimum guaratneed tax payer funded health system keeps insurance premiums down because 1) insurers can deny coverage for pre-existing conditions without being labelled as murderers, because the "free" system still provides healthcare, this reduces pay out risk for insurers which means premiums can be kept down; and 2) insurers are not only competing among themselves they are competing with the "free" option. So they have to provide better value for money than what the "free" option provides. Thus full cover insurance premiums for healthy people in many countries with UHC are much lower than insurance premiums for healthy people in the USA.

Hahahahahaha! Remember when my grandmother had to wait 9 months for an MRI scan. It wasn't urgent, but that is beyond rediculous! Unless you're suspected of having cancer, good luck with that, and even then you could be waiting at least 6 weeks for a spot to open up! Not enough beds at hospitals either, way too much immigration (which strains our system even more), and the fact we spend 230 billion a year to maintain this is just sad! I remember cases on the on the news of people dying in waiting rooms because they couldn't receive treatment in time. Hardly perfect...

Democrats had decades to work out what sort of healthcare system they want to put in place (and they still only managed to come up with the halfarsed Obamacare. Republicans have had less than 8 years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare, and in reality after exhasting all the court challenge avenues they had less than 4 years to start putting policy together. And given most people were expecting Hillary to win they probably throught they had at least another 4 years to really start putting pen to paper.

So I don't criticise them too much for not having a working solution ready at this stage. It's just that the spitball proposals that are doing the rounds are so awful and won't actually achieve better health care for lower cost. They will mostly achieve worse healthcare for lower federal cost. 

You didn't tell the whole story here. Obamacare is just a skeleton of UHC like any other country because it was deemed a threat to our constitution, consequently it got crippled severely out of the gate. Republicans had 2 years to just draft an ammendment to make it better but that would be a continuation of Obamacare and a betrayal to their constituents that voted on the repeal wagon.

“nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,”?

How about nearly every fucking body. "dumb man's idea of a smart man" indeed.

Well, healthcare isn't complicated, it's just the US that are incompetent when it comes ro finding a solution. They are stuck with catering to the big companies instead if just implementing universal healthcare for all.

"Nobody" knew Trump could be this incompetent.

I know a lot of people on the left really want UHC, and I remember Ted Kennedy being giddy with excitement at the prospect of finally having UHC. But really, unless the Republicans really screw up on healthcare badly in Trump's tenure and hand big majorities in Congress and Senate (60+ in the Senate) to the next Democratic president the implementation of Obamacare actually delays UHC in the USA more or less indefinitely.

It was interesting to see John Boehner's comment a few days ago that in the end the Republcan congress will settle for Obamacare with "conservative" tweaks. And if that is the outcome that will become the entrenched health care system for decades to come. As there will be no political capital or political will to reform the system further towards UHC.

It honestly feels like the USA has zero idea what to do about health care, your system is slow, inefficient, expensive and doesn't provide results.

You are paying something like 16-17% of GDP on Health and my country pays 9%. Yet we have longer life expectancy.



We have more beds, lower infant mortality rate, lower obesity, more Physicians per capita and higher quality care at a lower cost.

And the annoying part is... Trump is not going to make it any better.