Heavy question, I know. This is not intended to be political, please leave “taxes/government evil” out of it, I’m interested in a pragmatic view.
Infamously the US has mostly private health care, but we also have Medicare and -aid, the ACA, and the VA.
Most other nations have socialized health care in some format. Some of them have the option to have additional care or reject public care and go fully private.
Realistically, what are the experiences with your country’s health care? Not what you heard, not what you saw in a meme, not your “OMG never flying this airline again” story that is the exception while millions successfully complete uneventful and safe journey story. I’m also not interested in “omg so-and-so died waiting for a test/specialist/whatever”. All systems have failures. All systems have waits for specialists unless you’re wealthy, and wealth knows no borders. All systems do their best to make sure serious cases get seen. It doesn’t always work, but as a rule they don’t want people dying while waiting.
Are the costs in taxes, paycheck withholding (because some people pay for social health care out of paychecks but don’t call it a tax), and private insurance costs worth it to you?
I don’t live in Costa Rica, but I have family there and they have combined. They complain that the private healthcare systems lobby to underfund the public heathcare system in order to turn people away from public healthcare, and off to their services where they make more money.
So combined systems cannot exist, if you want public healthcare then it should quickly phase our private.
EXACTLY!
I like to think of this way: If society has two boats (one private for profit one and the other public) wealthy people will always seek to pay extra to ride in and fund the upgrades of the private boat rather than the public one. By simply offering a paid alternative, they prevent the public boat from being improved upon for the good of everyone. Offering a paid choice effectively torpedoes the free standard for others.
If we’re all in the same boat, society as a whole will unite and work towards improvements to that communal boat.
My personal horror story is that I took the time to make sure I went to an in-network hospital before I went to the ER for what ended up being an emergency appendectomy. The surgeon was in-network…for scheduled appendectomies. Emergencies were contracted out to a different organization who he was working for at the time, and that organization was not in network. So I got balance billed for it. I took the payment my insurance company gave me and sent it to him and said “look, I did all this research ahead of time and at no point did anyone ever tell me this would be out of network, so this is all you’re getting out of me.” They left it at that.
In most developed countries, health care is rationed by need. In the US we ration by ability to pay. I would gladly pay more for worse service so long as care was rationed by need.
