I'm collapsing the last two responses to stop cross-posting.
From
Message 126:
Yes, just like your taxes do. Those benefits could be going straight into your pocket just like taxes.
No, 'could be' is not 'is'. But I'm done arguing semantics.
Assertions without evidence.
See
Message 80.
Paying more than twice what other countries pay is worth it?
Maybe, depends on what you're paying for. I'm certainly willing to pay more money for better healthcare.
From
Message 124:
Cat Sci writes:
I dunno, sounds like Mod is saying an insurance plan in the UK costs over 20k.
Here is the same information for a third time:
So, I did respond to that chart in
Message 80. But this one is a different image and has a reference to the source in it.
Here's a link to
download the pdf it came from if anyone is interested.
Here's the terms for that chart in particular:
quote:
Definition and comparability
Total expenditure on health measures the final consumption
of health goods and services (i.e. current
health expenditure) plus capital investment in health
care infrastructure. This includes spending by both
public and private sources on medical services and
goods, public health and prevention programmes and
administration.
To compare spending levels between countries, per
capita health expenditures are converted to a common
currency (US dollar) and adjusted to take
account of the different purchasing power of the
national currencies, in order to compare spending
levels. Economy-wide (GDP) PPPs are used as the most
available and reliable conversion rates.
To compare spending over time, figures are deflated
using the economy-wide GDP implicit deflator for
each country. In the case of Chile, the Consumer Price
Index (CPI) is preferred since it is considered more
representative of price changes in the health sector in
recent years.
So that's data on what countries spend on goods and services, including capital investments in infrastructure, and is not what people spend on healthcare insurance. So that's really not a reply to what I was saying about the cost of insurance.
Anyways, since the U.S. does pay for more healthcare stuff than other countries, you cannot use that chart to put the sole blame on our system being for-profit rather than being socialized. Nor can you say that socializing our system would bring our expenditures down to where other countries are.
If you look on page 159 in the pdf I linked to, you can see that the U.S. spends their money quite differently too. We spend a smaller fraction on inpatient care and a larger fraction on outpatient care, and also spend the largest fraction on collective services (such as public health and prevention services and administration).
Page 161 shows that we're almost off the chart on our expenditures on pharmaceuticals.
I'd like to see how our expenditures on infrastructure differ, maybe we're building a lot more new hospitals than the UK.
So, there's a lot more to this than: "Look, this large one's for-profit and these other smaller ones are socialized, ergo if the U.S. was socialized we'd be like the small ones."