Quote:
Originally Posted by Spunt Drag
And how's the quality of the care? Or better yet the frequency at which you can even receive the care? If they call the doctor, how long til they get in? It's weird all these Canadians and Europeans come here for major medical.
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The quality of care in countries which would be one's whose models we should match. Is actually quite good. A short list of those countries would be (denmark, norway, sweden, germany, france, belgium, switzerland...etc)
On average they have 2x the number of doctors per capita. and 2x the number of hospital beds per capita than we do here.
Additionally they pay about 10% less as a percentage of GDP for healthcare than we currently do here in the states.
In both area's of Quality and Cost we lag far behind their models.
It is however true that the highest levels of healthcare are more available here in the states. Thus we often have medical tourism on our shores for extremely complicated / cutting edge procedures.
What i am refferring to above is not the high end optional medical practices typically conducted in medical tourism areas. I am referring to straightforward basic solid healthcare covering emergency service and preventive medicine. If we are talking about medical tourism, There are many other countries gaining ground on our foothold of medical tourism. (I'm sure you have heard of the medical vacations happening in thailand, brazil, south korea...etc)
With that said, I could give two ****'s less whether we as a country choose a viable socialized health care system (not the joke that is obamacare / ACA), or whether we choose a true free market system in which there is a truly Laissez Faire approach....
However making an argument to keep our current system of big pharma and big Medical protectionism through lobbying, cronyism, and all the other ism's that run rampant in DC..... That would be sheer lunacy.................... so it's almost sure to be what we will do as a country...
We have not even discussed the need for tort law reform, and how that would impact things as well.