> Your inflated health care bills helped pay for the 280k average salary of physicians (source: https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2018-compensation-overvie...), which is over 2x as high as Western european doctors' salary.

I doubt that's the majority of the massive cost difference.

> For instance: Western european doctors do not need a 4-year bachelors degree just to _enter_ medical school.

Don't know where you are basing this but in France, Pharmacist is High School Diploma + 6 years or + 9 year depending on the specialty. So you get out at 24 or 27 year old (best scenario), I doubt that's longer in the US or otherwise there's a big problem there.

Entry to both medical school and law school is usually done straight from high school in the UK.

Same in France, I guess the US is structured differently but overall it's probably the same amount of years. I doubt they study more than 6 or 9 years after high school or otherwise it's a bit too long.

Post-high school schooling for a standard family doctor (one of the lowest paid doctors): 4 years bachelors + 4 years medical school + 3 years residency = 11 years post-high school education.

Seems to be between 9 and 12 years after high school for a GP in the UK:

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/lengt...

Except, in the UK, med school graduates at age 22 are "junior doctors" and are getting paid starting Year 5 (first year of foundational school)

UK: Start getting paid year 5

USA: Start getting paid year 9

Big difference

Ah yeah, there's maybe something wrong there then, it's a bit too long I think. For a standard doctor, it's 9 years in France and it's already quite long.

Right, and it's two years longer than American medical school, as it's essentially combining the undergrad and the graduate into one program.

It's highly involved, but maybe not involved in the right way... the relationship looks rather incestous.

Europe spends half what we do on healthcare per-capita (and the gap is widening, as their costs historically don't grow as quickly - https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...).

Just because our government does a shitty half-assed job of it doesn't mean all governments have to.

PolitiFact, a liberal site, rates your claim as FALSE: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/...

That graph is not even accurate.

This says Canada's health care spending is $6600 per person: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/canada-to-spend-more-than-6-60... while your graph says its $4500. Those numbers aren't even in the same ballpark.

The graph is inaccurate because the 2017 and 2015 numbers are different?

Find any source - any reputable source - that indicate US healthcare costs are anywhere near the rest of the OECD.

Your graph (2015): United States: $10300 Canada: $4400 Ratio: 2.34

My actual findings (2017): United States: $9250 Canada: $6600 Ratio: 1.40

I think your graph is fake news.

Sources: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/04/20/5247741... https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/canada-to-spend-more-than-6-60...

"Different sources have slightly different numbers" isn't the same as "fake news". The OECD's numbers are publicly available.

The NPR link you cite has Canada at 4576 and the US at 9237, for a ratio of 2.02. The CTV link (citing a different organization; perhaps one considers dental/eyeware and the other doesn't, or something along those lines) doesn't offer US numbers to compare against.

Wikipedia has a consistently-sourced list you can peruse, too, for multiple years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

For one, you seem unaware that Canada has its own currency. You are comparing CAD with USD.

And yet health care costs are lower in countries where the government runs healthcare.

Our system of government involvement, where it’s neither a free market, nor a single payer system, is indeed an example of the worst way government can be involved.

And the Western European governments have _death panels_ to decide who deserves medical care and who deserves to die.

And, in Western Europe, you must wait over a month for your non-urgent surgery, and much longer to be admitted into the ER. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/world/europe/uk-national-.... And you might die while waiting for your medical care: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/bacchus-barua-/wait-times-cana...

And guess what, your taxes are 50% higher to pay for all this.

> And the Western European governments have _death panels_ to decide who deserves medical care and who deserves to die.

Private insurance is also a death panel, they decide who deserves medical care and who deserves to die.

> And guess what, your taxes are 50% higher to pay for all this.

The US health-care is not tax-free, you already pay more in the US for health-care with just the taxes than Western Europe. It's just that you also pay insurance on top of those taxes as well.

> And the Western European governments have _death panels_ to decide who deserves medical care and who deserves to die.

In the US, we just call them "insurance companies".

> And, in Western Europe, you must wait over a month for your non-urgent surgery

Have you ever tried to get non-urgent surgery in the US?

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-physician-rel...

> In a survey of 15 large U.S. metropolitan areas conducted by national physician search firm Merritt Hawkins, researchers found the average patient waited approximately 29.3 days to see a family medicine practitioner in 2016, an increase of approximately 50 percent since 2014.

> And guess what, your taxes are 50% higher to pay for all this.

Europeans pay half what the US does for their healthcare, including taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

> Have you ever tried to get non-urgent surgery in the US?

Whatever you say on this does not line up with reality.

The UK, a nation of 60 million, has 120,000 people waiting over 6 months for surgery: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-patients-waiti...

That would be equivilant to over 640,000 people waiting over 6 months for surgery in a country with 320 million people.

The wait times do not compare. They are 10x, 20x worse in Europe.

> Whatever you say on this does not line up with reality.

This sounds like you refuse to consider that you could be wrong. Is there evidence that would convince you, or will you simply decide any evidence is wrong and find a new justification?

I could be wrong (feel free to prove me so! ;) ) and there is nothing wrong with being convicable-but-unconvinced (as I currently am about the superiority of the US healthcare system) but that is not the impression I have taken from your comment.

Why is this a competition and quest for superiority?

The US is very different from its founding principles, priorities, and government structure. Comparing on just the basis of healthcare costs reduces these complex differences to simple sound bytes and obliterates any nuance.

This is not healthy for discussion.

You are correct that there are cases where the nuances make it impossible to have one be "superior" to another, and I'm not arguing otherwise.

That does not mean that some systems can't be objectively worse than a collection of others. I also never brought up costs - healthcare outcomes matter, because...health.

I never made it a quest for superiority - I insisted that everyone participating in a discussion should be in a place where they CAN be convinced of some points - arguing from a place of facts, not unshakeable emotion.

To do otherwise is unhealthy for discussion.

> The wait times do not compare. They are 10x, 20x worse in Europe.

What's the surgical wait time for an uninsured American?

That's 12.2% of America, or forty million people. http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/16/news/economy/uninsured-ameri...

In some cases, this winds up being an infinite wait time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02...

Side-note: I'm citing a whole bunch of sources in my replies to you. Maybe you could do so for your "10x, 20x" numbers?

You just moved the goalpost. We were talking about wait times for insured people, which is 88% of Americans. Can we stick to one topic until it is resolved?

For the 88% of Americans who are insured, their wait times are lower than in rich Western European countries and Canada, and far lower than poorer Western European countries like Italy.

Here's an article about people in Canada paying for surgery in the U.S. to avoid waiting forever for their surgery: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/Long+Canadian+wait...

Have you ever seen an article about people going to Canada for superior medical care? No. Canadian medical care is clearly cheaper but also inferior.

> We were talking about wait times for insured people, which is 88% of Americans.

No, we're talking about wait times for people in the respective countries. If you think wait times of six months are excessive, you should be incensed about "forever".

> Have you ever seen an article about people going to Canada for superior medical care?

I would suspect the citizenship/residency requirements make this difficult in practice, as does their legal ban on a parallel private system.

Meanwhile, if going overseas for care is a bad sign, as you allege, the US sees the same thing:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/americans-fle...

"Lots of people are pointing out that this isn’t really true, but I want to point out something different: Americans flee the US in pretty similar numbers to Canadians fleeing Canada. The best numbers we have suggest that about 45,000 Canadians left the country for medical care in 2015. (That’s all destinations, not just the US.) Meanwhile, about 250,000 Americans left the US for medical care abroad. And these numbers don’t even count the number of Americans who get their prescription drugs from overseas."

I'm sorry but Mother Jones is not a reputable news source. Can you link to some other site?

You should at least briefly skim it if you want to debate constructively. If you'd done so, you'd have noticed that the line "Meanwhile, about 250,000 Americans left the US for medical care abroad" is a link. To a US government publication at https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/c....

Even here in the UK with our avowedly socialist NHS you don't have to wait for anything - if you want you can always go private.