Free market healthcare advocates are like communists claiming to have the best government.
There is no successful example of either.
In the year 2010, my wife and I rang up over 1 million dollars in health care costs. That is why I have bought health insurance.
I would love to buy health insurance; but if I bought catastrophic health insurance (at a rate of $700 per month), and incurred the same health problems you did, I would be bankrupted by the deductible and the coinsurance. Catastrophic health insurance does not protect me from catastrophe. But full insurance like the kind that I had up until 2010, with just a minimal co-pay, no deductible and no coinsurance, would cost $1400 per month, which wipes me out.
So I choose to have no health insurance. If I run into a health crisis, I will either die, or get treated at the emergency room and declare medical bankruptcy. I also have an old Blue Cross card I will attempt to use to defraud the medical providers until they figure it out, if need be.
Heh. And articles in Pravda which used to say how horrible life in the US was were just like the anti-health reform people talking about how horrible healthcare is in England or other parts of Europe. Remember how they said Stephen Hawking would be dead if he lived in a socialist medicine system and how the Dutch wore wristbands saying “don’t kill me?” The Big Lie is not confined to Moscow.
Actually, it is the government that has made a mess of health care, not the market. But some people, despite the failure of the Soviet Union, think central planning works. They were the sort that said nothing in the 1930’s when Hitler centralized power. In fact, the NY Times, the Holy Bible of the left, wrote an editorial in the 1930’s pining for the sort of Brown Shirt nationalism they observed in Italy. Just as Mussolini made the trains run on time, so they think their dictator will fix health care.
You are going to have to explain this, and not just regurgitate what you heard on talk radio.
If he thinks the alternative being proposed by anyone is “central planning”, you’re wasting your time. Even the UK NHS, the most centralized of the socialized health systems, doesn’t have “central planning” other than deciding when and where to build hospitals.
The Soviet Union was a failure, no doubt. However, providing national healthcare wasn’t the reason for it. Lifespans in the Soviet Union were higher than in the US during the 50s and 60s and dropped fairly rapidly for males after the transition to privatisation in the 90s.
How’d that poem go again?
Oh yeah:
http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=195
Life expectancy in 1955: US - 72.8 USSR - 67
Life expectancy in 1958: US - 73.2 USSR - 68.6
Life expectancy in 1971: US - 74.7 USSR - 69.5
You were saying?
There were points during the late 50s and early 60s where life expectancy beat out the US (should have clarified the timespan).
Here is a graph charting the decline in health post privatisation:
Our out of pocket was close to 40,000
Thank you for helping to drive up the cost of insurance for the rest of us.
Pardon me for not dying. I am willing to suffer the ignominy of being a parasite if it will persuade others to support comprehensive health care reform. If not, you can just suffer with high rates.
A broken health care system is everyone’s problem, not just the uninsured.
I’d like sources on that. The ones I gave show US never dropping below 70 at that time and USSR not rising above 70.
“The trend continued into the 1960s, when the life expectancy in the Soviet Union went beyond the life expectancy in the United States.”
The cite for that paragraph is “The Seeming Paradox of Increasing Mortality in a Highly Industrialized Nation: the Example of the Soviet Union” by H. Dinkel.
You only pay $800 a month for a family of six? That is cheap cheap cheap man. How much is the yearly deductible? For me, a single guy with no dependents a years worth of health insurance would be about $3000 for full coverage plus a deductible of another $5000 before any benefits kicked in. For a guy like me who never goes to the doctor and never gets sick, I also think health insurance is a scam. I also believe all insurance is a scam especially when it is mandated like auto insurance. Auto insurance guarantees that if you are a good driver, your rates are based upon your credit score or the rest of the idiot drivers in your county and not on your good driving record. Huge scam.
Cheap is a value perception. Maybe as far as family rates go, but that still doesnt mean it is cheap “for him”
The common public are not trained medical specialists. His certainly sounded like an emergent issue to me. ER is supposed to be a public service, not an elite luxury for those wishing expedited service. I don’t know the solution, but any system that forces someone to simultaneously weigh the cost-benefit of imminent death versus catastrophic debt is fundamentally broken.
I’ve personally had, and witnessed in many others, “please don’t take me to the ER, I can’t afford it” moments with blood literally pooling on the floor.
Here’s a source I like 
, which shows Russia behind U.S. by 1 year during some of the years in question, but Ukraine ahead of U.S. by 2 years at some of the same points. (I wonder if some discrepancies involve Soviet=Russia conflation.)
But this doesn’t affect gamerunknown’s main point: the huge decline in health (and prosperity) after Soviet collapse, which is eye-catching in the graph I linked to.
BTW, I’ve wondered how life expectancy for a still-living population is predicted. I especially wonder about a graph linked-to above which shows, if I understand correctly, life expectancy for Americans born in 2050. 
1 mil? I believe you, but I’d like the details–if it’s not too nosy of me to ask.