You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

0
1

[–] mr_skeltal 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

That's interesting, I was under the impression American healthcare and insurance was insanely expensive. Here, if you are unemployed or otherwise disadvantaged you have a state-issued medical card that entitles you to free GP visits and greatly reduced medicine costs. I've never heard about medical bills ruining anybody unless they were middle class with no health insurance and got a rare disease.

0
1

[–] gonzoforpresident 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Don't get me wrong. Healthcare in the US is more expensive and imperfect, but our results are amazing when you factor in issues like our population density (only Canada and Australia have a notably lower density, however they have huge swaths of land that are completely uninhabited, unlike the US... and which we greatly outperform) which plays a huge role in both emergency treatment (time to treatment is critical) and ethnic diversity (and don't believe the reports that say we aren't very diverse, they measure diversity in a way that is massively biased against the US) which plays a large factor in risk factors.

And yes, our medical costs are extremely high, but the idea of them ruining people is absurd. The study that claims that medical costs are what forces people into bankruptcy (which prevents people's lives from being ruined, even though it isn't fun) has been well and thoroughly debunked. Costs can be brought down through competition and more open pricing. Government intervention has actually driven the cost of drug research through the roof and costs have more than doubled every decade since the 70s due to this.