Eran wrote:The result is that very few people actually pay for their medical care, and thus the most basic check on excessive costs is eliminated.
Exactly. Yet even a cursory glance at a graph of the price over time of medical procedures rarely if ever covered by insurance such as LASIK type eye surgery and cosmetic surgery shows them becoming ever less expensive.
Probably just a coincidence.
nucklepunche wrote:The simple reality is anybody who says American health care is the best in the world is either a fool or simply got lucky and has great insurance…
So
Pants-of-dog was being foolish when he said --
Pants wrote:This is just as I have been saying: if you have the money for top notch care, the US is the best.
No honest debater can deny that the quality of care available in the US is the best there is. All an honest debater can do is to accurately point out that in the US, you can't count on your government to pay all your medical bills (in actual fact, you can't count on any government in the world to pay all your medical bills, but let's set that aside for the moment). For most Americans for most of their lives for most medical conditions, they will have to rely on someone other than government to settle up their unpaid medical bills (be that their own bank account, their insurance company, family, friends, charity, union medical fund, whatever) or they will have to stiff their medical creditors and suffer whatever unpleasant consequences may follow from that default.
That's the tradeoff. That's TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) in action. That's the salesman's "pick any two out of three" iron law of economics as it plays out in the field of medicine. The US provides the best medical outcomes. And it charges the most to do so.
Phred