Sorry, hit post before I was ready.
For so many people, the assignment is “only doctor in this tiny town” and the wait time is a choice between “infinity, because no insurance” and “3-6 weeks, triage dependent”.
Having any preventative healthcare at all and not only emergency care would be a huge improvement for most people even if there was a wait time and they thought their assigned doctor was an asshole with no bedside manner.
It’s far from perfect, but my family would be bankrupt many times over in an American style healthcare system. Time off work and lost income and drug prices (thanks NDP for trying to help there!) are still an issue, but there’s no massive medical bills to cover either.
I make a very good salary, my husband too. We absolutely are privileged. And I’m happy to pay taxes, if it’s well spent. The purpose of government is, in my eyes, to provide that which the individual cannot reasonably provide for themselves. Healthcare is absolutely one of those things, and it needs more funding.
In vast rural America, where I’m privileged to live, we have exactly No doctors. For many tiny towns in long stretches of highway.
A Medical desert.
Docs a wanna work in the big urban centers. Don’t blame them.
The county hospital here is woefully crumbling and increasingly unmanned in the ER. Surgeries are sent to the bigger hospitals and surgical centers.
So we’re not in any better condition than you are about doctors being available.
I think Biden provided funding for Doc in a box places. And 2 had sprung up.
Always look busy.
I’m not sure how those work.
We have the County health clinic that provides all kinds of preventative care, prenatal care, baby care, and vaccinations.
Staffed with nurses and NPs.
If they have a fee its nominal.
We have that now.
I don’t expect we will have it much longer. You see, they don’t ask too many questions. Anybody can recieve what care they offer.
I think its state funded. But probably has a federal government component.
Prez.Orange may not have it on his cutting board, yet.
It’s not all terrible news. If you can get to a bigger town, care is more available and most likely top notch. With great Doctors and Surgeons.
I’m blessed. I know.
I do not mind my taxes payjng for better hospitals and equipment. Good Doctors willing to practice in smaller towns.
I vote for all health initiatives that seem thoughtful and correct.
I donate to the American kidney fund and breast cancer research.
If our politicians can get their collective thumbs out of their butts, we have a working(yet old) system that can work.
The way to pay for it, is the big question.
All these things, equipment, facilities and staff monies have to come from somewhere.
I don’t want social security, military retirement or SSDI pulled apart. Way too many people wouldn’t be able weather the expected screw ups and time needed.
We will need big safety nets.
The monster that is US healthcare is gonna be beastly to reform.
I’m sure I’ll be long dead before it’s even begun.
Indeed.
Think about this - the system in the UK (the National Health Service - Wikipedia) is non-profit.
The US system has to pay for insurance companies, lawyers, drug companies, private ambulance companies etc to all make a profit. And the patiennts pay for that.
Right. Which is why I take serious issue with assertions like this:
Some fraction of the people in the American healthcare system will receive excellent care. This is not synonymous with the system working. Let’s say for the sake of argument half of all Americans get good care. That doesn’t mean the system has failed the other half.
The American system is failing everyone. Well, except for the insurers and executives and stockholders who benefit from the profiteering.
Everyone else — even if they receive good quality care from time to time, and even if their personal coverage shields them from most of the cost — everyone collectively suffers the burden of these parasitic companies extracting billions of dollars out of the economy while bringing no benefit.
I looked it up and see that MRI Scanner systems can range from £25,000 to exceeding £500,000
There’s a broad range of prices depending on the power of the machine and the quality of the images they produce, but both of those seem very low. This is what I found:
While some low-field MRI machines can cost as little as $150,000, typical prices range from $1 million to as high as $3 million for a single, state-of-the-art, high-powered MRI machine that can deliver the most detailed results.
The investment for the facility doesn’t end there. MRI machines must be installed in magnetically sterile clean rooms that eliminate outside interference while protecting people and property outside the room from the magnetic fields. This can push the installation cost alone up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This led Money magazine to estimate that the total cost of purchasing and installing an MRI machine in a dedicated suite runs from $3 million to $5 million, an investment that must be recouped over the lifetime of the machine. And again, that’s for one single MRI machine.
Why Are MRIs So Expensive at Hospitals? - Heartland ImagingHeartland Imaging (heartlandimagingcenters.com)
I looked it up, too.
$35k to $3mil.
Not sure what that is in £s. Check Google translator, perhaps 
Lets not forget trained radiologists and medical personnel/nurse for the patient.
Lab workers. Readers. Technologist.
All MRI machines, where ever they are. What ever kind of healthcare your nation has, have to be paid for.
Its a product. Any hospital worth being, pretty much needs to have one.
Someone sells this product. That person ain’t in the business to walk away without a profit.
Who pays?
In the “shithole” 3rd world country (Zimbabwe) where I was born, medical care at all levels is free if you cannot afford it. Medical insurance pays, otherwise, and I’ve never been billed.
In the “shithole” 3rd world country I live in (South Africa), medical care at all levels is free if you cannot afford it. Medical insurance pays, and I have been billed as I was earning well over the margin.
So, sure, if I contribite to medical insurance, I am paying, but in reality that just gets me into a “better” hospital. If I was not contributing, I would still get into a world class hospital - the closest to me is Groote Schuure, a public hospital famous for Chris Barnard doing the worlds first heart transplant. I’d wager that patient got his surgery free.
In the UK, what little health care I needed was free.
I cannot understand how a supposed 1st world country can make this so complex and derimental to its own citizens.
@wolfpup , you’ll know this, or can find out.
Are there any stats on comparison, of disease control, cures, surgical outcomes, by nations?
Whatever system that’s in place?
It’s easy when you’re a capitalist plutocracy. And once they became mega-businesses, health insurers banded together into a national association and lobby group to make sure that this never changes, including by spreading FUD about universal health care in other countries.
You can find some of what you’re looking for in this paper [PDF document]. It’s for OECD countries, and not all the tables list all the countries. Unfortunately the document is 26 years old and there are probably better and more recent sources, but this will at least give you an idea.
Despite claims about great health care in the US, on many of the metrics the US does more poorly than Canada – the US has lower life expectancy for both males and females*, higher infant mortality, and higher trends in disability across almost all age groups.
* For 1996: Females; 81.1 for Australia, 81.5 for Canada, 79.4 for the US. Males; 75.2 for Australia, 75.4 for Canada, 72.7 for the US. I’m sure those numbers are much higher today across the board.
My family recently spent seventeen days in Albania on holiday. While we were there, my younger daughter had an issue with her ear. The hotel proprietor called her husband; he took us to the local public clinic. He told them we were his guests; “they’re with me,” basically. There was no bill, either for him or us.
Albania is a very poor country. They’re many years behind the rest of Europe in terms of infrastructure and economic development and the elimination of endemic corruption, after nearly five decades of closed borders under paranoid Communist dictatorship. To illustrate this, consider we were in five hotels over the two-plus weeks; four of the five lost electricity at least once. Even so, we enjoyed our visit tremendously. Lovely, generous people (mostly), phenomenal natural beauty, great food… they have major struggles as they try to catch up, but there’s a real sense of developing potential.
If fucking Albania can figure out public healthcare, the US has no excuse.
Their excuse is they don’t want it.
Whether they (we) want it or not — and the answer to that depends almost entirely on how the question is phrased — it’s not gonna happen absent an earthquake-level sea change. The existing clusterfleech system is so entrenched that even a baby step like the ACA was almost unthinkable.
An alternate explanation, if you’re only slightly more cynical than I am: so many palms are getting greased at every level that any proposal for something even slightly like UHC is dead on arrival.
And AHIP – “America’s Health Insurance Plans” is one of the most powerful lobby groups in Washington and one of the most powerful advocacy organizations in the US. They’ve had a significant role in creating the myth, believed by a majority of Americans, that under a UHC system their own personal health care would be greatly diminished. Add to that Americans’ historic distrust of government and the stigma of “socialism”, and their lobbying work isn’t that hard. In America, UHC has been thoroughly demonized, leaving Americans with the worst and most profiteering health care funding system in the world.
Beck asked about comparative statistics. Two research bodies whose work I see quoted a lot are:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policy-center/system-profiles
Hey, no one said there would be homework 
I know. I asked for it.
I got me some reading to do.
Thx, you two.
When American’s claim that a UHC would never work in the US because the population there is just too unwieldy, they conveniently ignore the Economics 101 lesson of economies of scale. The larger your population, the easier it is to implement cost-saving measures in all sorts of production, and IMHO, especially health care.
The difference, as has been mentioned above time and time again, is that the US health-care model is primarily a FOR PROFIT one, unlike any other in western democracies. And once you have a profiteering system, there is no incentive to reject that for one that prioritises actual health care for people over the bottom line, the almighty $$.
Like Beck, I doubt the US system can be overhauled any time soon. But that doesn’t mean you folks shouldn’t be petitioning your pollies every chance you get (I know you are, keep it up!!) because otherwise, in another 50 years, your citizens will be dying even more prematurely from preventable diseases and disorders solely on the basis of their taxable income.
It reeks.