Health care around the world

Nice info! Now that I’m visiting the US, I’m finding it very interesting how this has played into society. I’ve been taken totally offguard at some people’s stance on the issue on either side. From the outside (of the US) it doesn’t make sense why there is even a debate raging on the issue, but being here I can see that people are very empassioned on their particular take.

All I know is that I had to pay a lot of money in travel insurance just to be able to visit the US lest the worst happens, and there is no way I could live here full-time because my work would not cover my healthcare (and I’m healthy). I find that quite scary.

While applying to medical schools, I read up a lot on this issue. The most interesting observation i got from this graph picture that 31% of the costs in United States are due to administration, compared to 16% in Canada. The problem is tricky, and I am disappointed with how the healthcare reform bill panned out. The reason the US spends so much of their GDP on healthcare is because healthcare prices are incredibly inflated, because of the government itself. Medicare and Medicaid programs do not reimburse the doctors completely because they have a lack of funding, so the physicians and hospitals inflate the prices so that the 50% of the price they receive from medicare and medicaid is actually the full price! In turn, this drives up the prices of everything, so medicare and medicaid can now gripe even more for lack of funds, and normal people without insurance or with bad insurance are forced to pay a ridiculous inflated price on the procedures when their insurances don’t cover it. It is a big mess because now many doctors won’t accept medicare/medicaid patients, and those patients are forced to go to lower-quality doctors or public hospitals, lowering the standard of care.
Creating public insurance options will not remedy this problem. It is the middle man: the insurance companies through which all payments have to go through. In my opinion, I would prefer to have basic universal healthcare and make extra insurance an optional buy, similar to what they have in Germany.
However, many jobs would be lost in the insurance market if that was ever implemented, and with the fragile economy that we have right now, I doubt even democrats would be interested.