I live in Australia. Last year I was diagnosed with aggressive nodular melanoma. In a matter of weeks/months it spread to all the lymph nodes in my left leg. I've been through a solid year of treatment so far with half a dozen CT and MRI scans, 5 major surgeries, 3 minor (day) surgeries, chemo, constant physiotherapy and rehab, more medication than i could list, and dozens of specialists. I'm out of pocket by about $1000 total (mostly got the gap fee for one of my specialists).
If I was in the US or elsewhere, I've been told it would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Money I never could have paid.
We have optional private health cover here, but I didn't have it. All my stuff is done under the Medicare system which we pay for with our taxes.
I owe them my life. Literally.
Here in the UK a program was started sending out postal tests for bowel cancer to men and women of an at risk age.
One arrived for my father, he wasn't going to bother, he felt fine, and to do the test you had to paste a bit of poo into the kit and post it back, which grossed him out a bit. My mother persueded him to do it, and 3 weeks later he was called up by the hospital, as they'd detected blood.
2 weeks later he was having internal test and a month after that had a tumour and a couple of feel of colon removed.
It's now 3 years later and thankfully the tumours have not returned, though he has 6 monthly check-ups until the 5 year mark, then down to yearly.
All this was free (well paid for by tax). By pre-emptively catching the cancer early the NHS was able to both save a mans life, and also save a huge amount of money that could have been spent on late stage care.
I am forever indebted to the NHS and universal health care. As a self employed artist my father wouldn't have been able to afford private care, and I hate to imagine the state of care he would have received in another country, where universal free healthcare did not exist or was underfunded. The money we pay here in tax is far less than that paid in other countries in insurance, and covers everyone equally.
Just the US, if you restrict yourself to "advanced economies".
The parents needed to quit their jobs because they needed to move to NC. They needed to move because of the procedure. Yes it might be a grey area but I'm okay with exceptions like this.
It's not really a gray area, a number of countries either have a concept of "caretaker leaves" or let parents use sick/parental leaves to take care of young children (in Sweden for instance, parents can take their paid sick leave — 364 days @80% then 550 days @75% — to care for children under 12)
Therefore, in most countries with UHC they'd have been taken care of and likely would not have had to do a fundraiser.
Oh, you can go the private route. But you're still paying the cost of the public option. And both combined? Yeah, far more than what we pay here in the US.
The above isn't made up, it's just a small sample of why I left Canada. I could never subject my children to that horrid system again without feeling as if I was abusing them.
And in any case, Canada does not have the only public healthcare system in the world. There are many that do not have such extreme waiting times.
(Of course, this whole discussion is academic, since the US is incapable of implementing any public healthcare system, waiting times or not).
> Every single person in this country should be paying the same monthly fee for coverage.
> Unfortunately in this country, we have people that will yell out "let them die" at a presidential debate about what to do with the uninsured, and why we shouldn't force people to pay for healthcare.
But what if I don't want to pay that monthly fee? What if I, as a person who isn't you, decide I want to spend my $1000/year on something that isn't health care, and I want to die if I get into an accident that requires expensive surgery? Why is that not an acceptable outcome, given that I know about it a priori?
The real argument about health care cannot and should not be separated from taxation or any other economic issue - it's simply a question about how we, as a society, should subsidize poor people to enable them to pay their premiums. If they elect to do so is another issue entirely.
I have no problems with a blanket tax on that basis alone. It's not as simple as giving people the option to opt out - by doing so they impose a cost on the rest of society even if they never get in an accident or take their symptoms to a doctor. Being a member of society has always been a quid pro quo, and I can't see why healthcare should be excluded from that bargain.
In the case of mandating healthcare, it's not that I think people should have the choice of whether or not to participate in the system, it's just that the rest of us can't go on just letting our fellow citizens die when they get severely injured. It's just unthinkable.
Also, I think this debate is a rabbit hole since it is a complete strawman. I would argue that, given the correct subsidies by the government and proper knowledge about health care, almost every person in the world would choose to buy a health plan of some sort. If you don't agree with that, you must have a strange view about how the vast majority of people make decisions.
I certainly agree with that, and the thing that is going to help us get to a system like that is a mandated system. Do you also think social security should be optional and when people get old and can't work they are SOL and left to rot?
Wouldn't you much rather see that money being used to keep you sure that some medical condition won't drive you and your family into financial ruin? That it doesn't matter what kind of weird disease you may get, you'll get proper treatment?
Everybody needs healthcare/health insurance, and we are all the same species. Every single person in this country should be paying the same monthly fee for coverage. If wind up in a hospital, you should never even have to think about how it's going to be paid for.
Unfortunately in this country, we have people that will yell out "let them die" at a presidential debate about what to do with the uninsured, and why we shouldn't force people to pay for healthcare.