Heck, I’d be satisfied with links to articles written by bigger name pundits.
I know this is a spinoff of my old thread asking conservatives to explain how Europe is so oppressed for not having to pay to get medical care, but this comes up all the time and it really does kind of bother me.
What makes you think conservatives support the US health care system, when every single person who voted for it was a Democrat?
Because it was originally a Republican plan. They just turned around and opposed it because they automatically oppose anything Obama wants to do.
John Boehner disagrees with you.
Oh, wait…
This is disingenuous.
It is quite clear that the “system” the OP is talking about is not Obamacare, which is scarcely a “system”, but more like a minor tweak of the regulations governing the actual system, but the wholly unsystematic “system” America had before, and still has, of private health insurance mostly provided as a job benefit by employers to those lucky enough to have a good enough job, supplemented by (different) socialized systems for veterans and the elderly, plus various ramshackle, uncoordinated, and deeply inadequate provisions for those not lucky enough to be covered in any of these three ways (or, rather, these myriad of different, inconsistent, ways, since every insurance scheme is different).
Nobody at all voted for this system. It was just allowed to develop in all its awfulness. At least some Democrats would, if given the chance, probably vote to replace it with something more rational. However, many American conservatives, including most Republican politicians (and probably many Democrats too) have clearly shown themselves willing to fight tooth and nail against any such thing happening. That is what the OP is asking to hear the justification for.
Of course, there is no justification really. The reasons have much more to do with entrenched monied interests and the deep-seated corruption that pervades American politics (in both major parties) than they do with either ideology or the national interest.
They certainly oppose major reforms like considering a single payer system, often citing that the US health care system is the envy of the world, since whenever rich oil princes need rectal surgery they come right here.
You could ask the hypothetical as “why should their health care be more like the pre-Obamacare status quo” and it’d be more or less the same question.
Some conservative Americans would, indeed, recommend that European nations (and Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand, and Japan, and Taiwan, and South Africa, and India…) disband their public health system and return to a payment-for-services model, which allocates services on the “rational” basis of paying for it, just the way you pay for your groceries or theater tickets.
Some of them would also recommend the end of welfare support doles, rent control districts, wage and price controls, and protections against racial discrimination.
(There seriously are still Americans who think that the civil rights interpretations of the Supreme Court were mistaken, and that a restaurateur ought to have the right to discriminate against customers on the basis of race, religion, language, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.)
But, what the hell, there are still some people in this country who do not believe that Jews have souls.
The two arguments I commonly see against UHC:
It’s not as good as you think (waves hand, mentions wait times maybe).
It’s unsustainable and will collapse at some point, maybe because of the graying population and a lack of working young people to support them or maybe too many immigrants will clog the system. Expect to see warnings like “the bill will come due” or TANSTAAFL.
Well then, simplify Grumman’s question: what makes you think conservatives want European or Canadian health care to be more like the USA’s? I’m a regular reader of conservative sources such as the National Review and Weekly Standard. Nothing I’ve read there suggest that conservatives think the USA had a good system before passage of the ACA or now, when no one knows which parts of the ACA the President will bother to enforce next year, or even next week.
It’s most likely to true that many Republicans, Democrats, and independents would oppose any new, massive overhaul of the entire health care system; that, however, is not the same as believing that the current system is a good one that everyone should imitate. Some conservatives certainly do promote ideas for changing health care in the USA. (Personally I’m more a fan of libertarian ideas.)
Not that you support this argument, but I always find it an odd one to cling to, given that, under the American status quo, I’ve frequently had to deal with significant, sometimes even ridiculous, wait times anyway (not to mention all the time I’ve had to spend coordinating insurance preauthorization, etc.). Besides which, short wait times are only meaningful if you have the means to access healthcare in the first place. But I suppose that’s the underlying plus for certain conservatives: shorten the lines by kicking out the riff-raff.
(Of course, my personal experience with wait times may not be reflective of overall statistical trends. For all I know, it really is generally much worse in other developed countries, in this one particular regard.)
I do not support US health care, but think that it’s generally superiour to European health care systems when it comes to the quality of service. Especially for more complex and rare diseases and operations.
The current system (or lack-of-system, as someone else said) is stupid. However, I don’t think that the systems that countries like the UK or Canada have set up are great either, just cheaper.
Conservatives would probably say that health care should be run by the states, but if we were to ignore that and assume that conservatives wanted a national system, it would probably be something more like the Swiss system, so I will argue in favor of that.
Basically, the way that the medical field works in the UK is that the government correlates back the effectiveness of treatments and bases all spending on that, and they use the fact that they have umpteen million patients in their care to negotiate prices with medical supply and drug companies, ensuring bottom dollar on their purchases. This means that Brits get the most cost-effective medical care that their government can possibly provide.
In terms of statistics and finance, that’s wonderful. But at the same time, Cuba ends up having great statistics because (according to what I’ve seen said on the board) they abort any fetuses that don’t test as being super-healthy, before being born. That results in a generally healthier population with fewer medical requirements through their life. Americans will allow a Downs Syndrome baby to live through to birth and try to provide it with a complete and fulfilling life, expending resources on special schooling, glasses, corrective surgery, or whatever else in order to facilitate that. But the end result of that, from a statistical standpoint, is that the US’s numbers suck and Cuba’s are awesome. Statistics don’t tell the whole story.
I’ll get back to the UK in a moment, but to continue talking about Cuba, let’s also note that Cuba reportedly has some of the best-trained doctors in the world. But what medications has Cuba invented? What medical techniques were found and proved by the Cuban medical industry? None. If the US and Europe weren’t pioneering science, Cuban medical knowledge would almost certainly stay exactly the same from decade to decade. Their doctors are only any good, because we discovered new things and were willing to let them leach that knowledge off of us.
The thing is that new treatments are costly and uncertain. They’re also generally of pretty limited effectiveness. We tend to think of death as being caused by cancer or heart attack or something, but the reality is that the body is just generally “falling apart”. Young people don’t have heart attacks because their bodies are still properly put together, not because “heart attack” is a disease that targets people of a particular age group. Even if you cure “heart attack” in one person, it’s really just a symptom of a larger issue, which is that the person is old and nearing their due-by date. So for all the money and effort spent on a new treatment for cancer, heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, or whatever, the cost-effectiveness just isn’t there. The person lives for a few months longer than they would have otherwise and still dies, because they’re old and they’ve been weakened by the disease and all the time spent in bed – all the while costing a vast sum of money.
From hard numbers, you should kill unhealthy fetuses and you should just euthanize people once they’re starting to fall apart at the end of their lives. The UK doesn’t go for the first (that I know of), but to a limited extent they are going with the second, by not providing access to the (basically pointless) sci-fi technologies that the US has.
Really, 98% of medical advance in the last 10,000 years was the discovery of basic sanitation. All technology past soap, face masks, rubber gloves, and sewage pipes is pretty well pointless from a cost-effectiveness standpoint.
But if you believe that we can find solutions for each new hurdle and that the costs of treatment will drop, then financing the continued research into and usage of impractical medical treatments for limited gains, is necessary. And in order to allow that, you need to allow people to make the choice and plonk down money for it as they will.
The problem with that, as a politician, is that at some point you have to get up and say either, “You get what you paid for and if you didn’t pay anything, then tough.” Or, “The government only covers you up to $X and if you need more than that, you have to pay yourself or die.” Neither of those sounds great.
The big complaint in the US is that we don’t/didn’t have universal coverage, but the fact is that there is a minimum level of care that is available to everyone in the nation. That level of care isn’t great, but everyone is covered by it. But there’s no way to raise that minimum to something which doesn’t suck compared to someone else’s level of care, unless you mandate a cap on care across the nation.
Personally, I think that capping the level of care is pointless. If the rich want to spend more on their health care, so that they have 300 channels on their hospital TV and no waiting line to get in to use an MRI, well that may drive down the statistics of the nation from a cost-effectiveness standpoint, but ultimately, it’s not my tax dollars going into it, so why should I care? Thanks to them, American hospitals have MRIs and maybe one day I’ll have the freedom to pay to use one too.
But if you want to raise the minimum level of care, go for it. But it’s pretty likely that it will just drive our cost-effectiveness ratio even further into the red, since the minimal level of care to get someone to 98% of their natural lifespan was already covered, for everyone in the nation.
So if you want to live in a country with great statistics, then you should vote for a UK/Canadian model. If you want to support medical advancement and to have the freedom to choose how cost-effective you want to be with your own money, then a US/Swiss model is better.
How about the county level ? Or better yet, to ensure frugality, the township level ?
Power to The People !
I dunno if the general diffusion of scientific knowledge is best described as ‘leeching’.
I don’t know that they do. I certainly did not say I thought so. (I suspect that they do not really care much about the health care systems of other countries.) What does certainly seem to be the case, however, is that they are prepared to fight tooth and nail against any major reforms of the American system -heck, they have already fought tooth and nail against the quite minor reforms introduced under Obama - and certainly any reforms that moved America towards the manifestly more just, effective, and efficient systems used in other first word countries, systems that achieve better health outcomes for proportionately more people, for much less money.
As I said, however, I think the reasons for their fighting against reform have much more to do with corruption (that deeply and systemically afflicts American electoral politics across the board) than with conservative ideology. However, a conservative ideology can provide a better smokescreen for these particular corrupt purposes than a more liberal ideology can, so the Republicans get to do most of the dirty work on this one.
That is a false choice.
There is nothing stopping me as a UK citizen having a free basic level of care and at the same time paying extra for the gold standard. I’m perfectly free to have private healthcare should I wish.
Plus, you’ll find medical advancement pottering along quite nicely in UHC countries thank you.
Yup and this is very relevant to the OP:
We have the best doctors and the best medical technology in the world.
The middle and upper classes have very good healthcare in the US. The poor are worse off: they get worse doctors if they could even afford it at all.
And that’s the crux of the problem: healthcare is too expensive for the poor so they go without insurance.
Conservatives fear a radical turnover in a system that by and large works well for people but has rough edges to address. Denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions and pricing out several tens of millions of (mostly-young) people.
I wouldn’t want to convince European nations, or Canada, to adopt our system. They are content with the necessary drawbacks of single-payer systems.
If we indeed do have “the best doctors and the best medical technology in the world” it is not getting us much and the rest of the world would want no part in it.
Repeatedly, in study after study, health outcomes in the US are among the worst in the developed world despite costing 2.5x more.
Not all European health care systems are single-payer: France and Germany do not among others. And the problems aren’t just those but the vastly higher spending as percentage of GDP on healthcare.