this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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The only thing crazier to me than American healthcare is how many of my fellow Canadians keep pushing for us to have this bullshit, too.
It's not just Canada - there are people in countries with far better Healthcare Systems that the US, including with National Health Services, who want a US style one.
However this isn't "man on the street" kind of people, these are the kind who think that if Healthcare costs went from 7% of GDP to 14%, they themselves would be able to capture a significant proportion of those extra 7% - so "investors", financiers and the kind of politicians bought with money from ultra-rich Americans (like the money that Steve Bannon came to Europe with a couple of years ago very overtly to strengthen the far right).
My own country now has an ultra-neoliberal part that popped-up from nowhere some year ago after Steve Gannon brought that money to Europe, with the most glitzy marketing and the most expensive political pamphlets of all parties, and who, in a country with an actual National Health System, were the only party that wanted it fully privatised, though they stopped being open about it when they found out people were overwhelmingly against it. This party's ideology has zero local ideas or basis and is wholesale imported from the America's hardest neolibs (think Financiers and Tech Bros) and yet it got itself up to 7% of the vote in about 5 years.
What's their argument?
That US system is better cause the privileged don’t have to wait…
Most countries have a private option in some capacity.
But they want the poor to help pay for their privilege...
Even if a semi-private healthcare system means the rich get better care, the money generated will improve the free system vs what we have now. So overall everyone gets better care although some people get BETTER better care
This is exactly NOT what will happen.
I'm assuming that was your intention OP, but just in case:
What will happen is private sector clinics/practices/ect will be able to pay more than public, because they can charge whatever they want, so all the talented nurses/doctors ect will vacate the public sector for private, leaving public understaffed and underfunded even more than it is now. Then some shit government will point at the anemic public system they let suffer and say "it doesn't make sense to keep this thing alive" and take it out back and shoot it. Then we turn into the states.
The rich get better care (which they can already get with a quick plane ticket if they can't wait) everyone else gets $300 cream.
It's f-ing ridiculous that anyone believes for profit healthcare would (note I believe they COULD, they just are designed not to) provide better care than a unified public service that wasn't being slowly chipped away to make room for profiteering.
Exactly, it could work in theory, but that theory relies on our government executing a proper plan, which they repeatedly seem incapable of doing. Anyone who believes it could work at this point is hooked up on hopium (in my opinion)
It doesn't even work in theory. The core concept of a two tiered system is unstable. One way or another, one of those two systems will collapse the other.
I don't see how it could work in theory. Let's assume you have a public and a private system and somehow the private system magically performs better than the public system. Then people cut support and funding for the public system and all you have is a private system. But now everyone is stuck with it, so at best you have to have a large body of regulators watching over private companies that are trying to flout the rules as much as possible because that's their profit margin. And this must all unavoidably drive up the price, because of the profit margin and the extra people involved.
And that's all assuming that you can properly regulate the system, which you clearly can't, because the more money it has then the more power it has, and healthcare is a massive industry.
Yeah! I'm sure if we give insurance CEOs enough money, the excess will "trickle down" to the rest of us! There are 0 examples of this backfiring spectacularly.
Our Healthcare system isn't properly funded and managed for our growing population. Covid burst the bulkheads and is used as an excuse to push for private government funded clinics as "more access to healthcare is better". Why don't we save some money and just open more public clinics is never on our politicians agenda.
This is the grifters spreading misinformation so that they can privatize healthcare and make money off of it.
And people fall for it.