It's even worse in the UK. The wait lines there are unbelievable. I have a friend who had his ACL torn and they told him they would not pay for it, because he wasn't a professional soccer player. As an office worker, he was told he could live with a torn ACL. Now, his knees have worn through his meniscus from the instability from not having an ACL. So he's in constant pain. However, since I live in the US, my insurance paid for my ACL replacement and I'm good as new with no pain and perfect meniscus. That is the difference between Socialism and a free market. Free markets almost always produce better outcomes at a lower price.
To the extent our health market is breaking down, it's that in the US, we have allowed the insurance companies to write our laws and the Congress has allowed the states to implement a wide variety of incompatible local laws and regulations, which increases the costs for insurance companies to operate country wide. In addition, we have added huge layers of bureaucracy, which have increased costs. Then hospitals and care providers have taken advantage of the craziness to obfuscate the true costs of the care, so that consumers cannot price shop.
If we really want to fix this mess, we need to scrap almost all of the laws in existence today and set more general guidelines to unleash the power of the free market to come up with solutions. Government solutions will not fix this mess...they will only make it worse.
Think of what the Telecom Act of 1996 did for the Internet. It deregulated and the Internet boom happened. We need to deregulate the health care industry at the Federal, State, and Local level and then let the free market figure it all out. |
