However, I don't think the current US system is a mistake. First of all, just by comparison, doctors in Canada are not employees of the government. A medical clinic is a private practice owned by the doctor. Hospitals are run by not-for-profits set up by charitable organisations, or incorporated by the government but by no means a part of it. The difference is, all these private providers send the bill to the government instead of the patient.
All of the national health services of which I am aware, in every developed country, work this way. There is a misperception in the USA that national healthcare systems in developed countries are bureaucracies in which every provider works for the government, which is the only source of healthcare. The reality is that national healthcare systems come much closer to a true market-based economic system than does the heavily socialized system currently operating in the US.
In the States, billing will continue to be a nightmare as insurance companies fight patients over premiums, subsidies, co-pays.
Yes, this is another problem with Obamacare/private insurance.
A big reason for the inefficiency of the American system is the need for medical providers to maintain large staffs of billing people who spend their careers fighting insurance companies. And on the other side, insurance companies maintain large staffs of people to fight the providers. It causes long delays in reimbursement to providers, and often draws in the patient, who is typically demanded to pay for services his insurance company has agreed to cover, but is fighting.
No industry on earth operates with less efficiency than the American healthcare system. It is as bad as commerce gets.
So I see this as an evolutionary thing, and that this is a good step.
Obamacare is better than doing nothing. Healthcare chews up ~18% of the American economy, about twice as much as any other nation on earth. It is destroying American competitiveness. It gets worse every year. It is absolutely unsustainable.
But, as an "evolutionary step," Obamacare is a tiny one. It does little to address the underlying problems of American healthcare. And it is unlikely to evolve into a system competitive with current European or Canadian systems within any of our lifetimes.
BTW you seriously have to get rid of co-payments, or at least reduce them to a tiny percentage. I looked at that web site and it was saying basic insurance only covers 60% of the cost??!! That gets expensive fast.
Yes, exactly. This is what I keep saying.
Most people are going to go with the less expensive plans, because that is the minimum they will be able to afford. But those plans are
worthless. The patients will still be responsible for about 40% the cost of
covered services. And a lot of services are
not covered at all. The less expensive plans have high deductibles and large copays. All of which means that patients
still will not be able to afford healthcare in the United States. Middle class people are being required to pay a great deal of money for no real healthcare coverage at all.
It is sad that the richest nation on earth is the only developed nation that cannot afford to take care if its people.
