Can confirm we don't have any sort of HSA/deductible fees.

You just phone the doctor and make an appointment. Stuff happens. Pay for nothing. Ambulance turns up to help you? No payment. 5 days in hospital? No payment. Major surgery? No payment.

15 years ago, I went to the doctor with a back pain, turned out it was an pilonidal abscess, got told not to eat anything, sent directly to hospital, surgery next morning, next 2 days in hospital, then nurse came round to my house once a week for the next 8 weeks to change the dressings. I paid? Nothing. No-one even mentioned cost. I filled in no forms. It just happened.

Only thing we have to pay for is prescriptions, a fixed fee regardless of the drug of £9 ($12). And only people who can afford it, people like pensioners and people on benefit get prescriptions free. Oh, and a fairly small charge for dental checkups (£40 every 6/12 months) and if you want non-standard dental work (you used to have to pay for white fillings, otherwise you got the cheaper amalgam ones, but now you can get either I believe).

They'll usually tell you if it's a lot cheaper to buy for prescriptions yourself, i.e. if they reckon simple painkillers is the best thing, the doctor will tell you to go buy £0.40 paracetamol from the supermarket, instead of giving a prescription for the same drug at £9.

Doctors in the UK don’t regularly make $300k+ per year.

https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/uk-doctors-salary-report-...

https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2019-compensation-overvie...

Nor do most US doctors, what's your point? And programmers in the UK don't regularly make $250k+ a year either.

Different countries, different pays.

TBH, if you feel doctor pay is somehow too expensive in the US, you're probably thinking about the wrong thing.

I would confidently expect the profits all your health insurance companies dwarf the difference in doctor salaries (an activity which is economically and socially worthless rent-seeking), let alone the salaries of all the utterly pointless health insurance company employees.

The median is over $300k for most of the fields in my link, and from my doctor friends, most easily clear it. The point is that healthcare costs less in other countries. Doctors’ labor costs less, medicines cost less, lawsuits cost less.

There’s no way to attack this problem than to lower the costs. And that means lower pay. Insurance companies have 20% margins at most, by law. Their activity is not socially worthless. The NHS performs the same activity as insurance companies, but US voters don’t want the government to do that.

Health insurance companies in the US absolutely ARE socially worthless. They’re the singular reason we have this crazy price inflation. Doctors raise prices as a direct way to impact what they actually get paid from insurers. Insurers have “market power” (read that as-unilateral power to tell their customers and providers which way they can shove it) over providers incomes. In order to get price X from insurance providers charge X+e where e is an inflation factor to noisily correct for the kick in the pants from the insurance company. But by law providers then have to charge that price from everybody. This is a failed market.

Prices clear when supply curves meet demand curves. A plumber can’t charge $1,000 per hour because another equivalently plumber is willing to work for $200 per hour.

Doctors can charge high prices because they have low supply and high demand for their services.

No one is stopping a doctor from offering their services at $25 or even $50 per 30 min consultations. If doctor A was offering their services for X + e to insurance just to get X, and doctor B was offering their service for Y, and Y is less than X, then insurance would still go with doctor B even though there was no “e”.

Insurance companies solve the issue of a buyer having no knowledge about what they are buying since they also employ doctors to check others’ work, and to negotiate pricing as a group. Some countries don’t need this since the buyer is the government, but the government is still performing the same functions of negotiating prices and verifying doctors’ work.

What is it about Americans that cause them to be so belligerent in the face of basic, clear, undeniable evidence?

A lot of countries have universal healthcare and, shock, horror, it is cheaper per capita.

A lot of countries have strict gun laws and, shock, horror, they don't have mass killings.

But no, you're American, of course you're way is right because, um? You say so! You've have some compelling "arguments", despite all the evidence.

It would be funny if it wasn't causing so many preventable deaths, both from a lack of affordable healthcare, and mass murder sprees.

I don’t know what you thought I was arguing, but my intent is to point out that things with NHS are cheaper because everyone in the healthcare chain earns less in the UK.

I never mentioned the US way is the right way, I actually think taxpayer funded healthcare is the way to go if we are going to force hospitals to provide care to anyone that shows up at their doors.

There is a lot of overhead from insurance companies that isn’t needed IF the US had taxpayer funded healthcare, but there isn’t, so they do serve a purpose of vetting a provider’s care and negotiating pricing.

Americans are being pumped full of divisive rhetoric from every angle and their politicians have been swinging to the right for something like forty years. The right wing realized the population elects R or D with something like a coin toss rate independent of what platform the party runs upon decades ago. As a party, the Rs decided to just always push their party platform to the right at every election, regardless of win or lose. It worked, and we’re four decades into the practice. All the while, the Ds also moved right in response to the center moving and not knowing the same premise. This is for national elections.