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June 10, 2005
Healthcare: busses, Chevrolets, and Cadillacs.
The British healthcare system is (rightly) the whipping boy of socialized medicinal. It is a truly terrible example of how not to run a healthcare system. There is a good reason Americans wedded to the private system we have now overlook the French system, or the Canadian one, or the Japanese one, or just about anyone else’s: they work better...
In the comments to this post Hale Adams says:
The American system sucks, too, but only in the sense that it "sucks" that most of us want "Cadillac" care when we have only "Chevrolet" budgets. If you're willing to accept "Chevrolet" care-- that is, what you can actually afford-- you can get good service.
The problem Hale overlooks, that advocates of free market medicine often overlook, is that a good many people don’t even have "Chevrolet" budgets-- they have budgets only for bus fare...
Indeed, going one step further; almost no one has a "Chevrolet" budget; by and large employers are left to negotiate with insurance companies to drive prices down to “Chevrolet” levels, which are then affordable (after the employer also subsidizes much of the health transition)...
This is perhaps the most damming part of our system: by attaching healthcare availability to specific employers, people get locked into jobs which they otherwise might leave. On top of that, American employers are having to carry a cost of doing business (paying for their employees health) that simply no other post-industrialized nation on Earth has to pay for! If the American government were to pay for the health of (say) GM’s employees, they wouldn’t be in bankruptcy right now...
Posted by Andrew at June 10, 2005 01:25 PM
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