Compare your Health Care

[FluffyMcDeath]

You live in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Canada or the US?How does your health care rank?

 

[cecilia]

this comment at the bottom on the page caught my eye:

@zzzmd again:
“there are international wings in many of our hospitals” you say. Well, fancy that. Have you ever been abroad, zzzzmd? Do you even have a passport? Probably not (since in your mind America is #1, the best, etc). Newsflash for you: Americans fly abroad for all types of medical care! Yes, sorry to break the news to you. In Prague, Czech Republic there is a booming “medical tourism” business, and yep–most of the customers come from USA, because even with the cost of the air ticket the top notch medical care received by Americans in Prague is so much more cheaper and hassle free than battling the health insurance companies in USA. Same goes for Mexico, tons of Americans head south of the border for more affordable healthcare.

Either you don’t know about this, or don’t like to bring it up as it exposes how farcical and naive your arguments are in this thread.

“Our best care is the best”: spoken like a true, jingoistic American. I’m sure for you there is no need to ever travel abroad and see another country, since “America is the best” in every conceivable way, and the rest of the world should fall in line behind USA…blah blah blah. Get so tired of this arrogant mentality by americans. Sheesh give it a rest.

 

[faethor]

You live in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Canada or the US?How does your health care rank?

<sarcasm> You pinko commies will never understand. We're #1 in cost. More than twice the other countries. The free market is working the way it's supposed to. Sure quality may go up if we went to a government healthcare but the costs would go down. This is a loss of money to a capitalist system. We'd lose our #1 spot and that is clearly socialism at it's worst. No profits. </sarcasm>

 

[JoBBo]

You live in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Canada or the US?How does your health care rank?

I find the "Timeliness of Care" rating extremely interesting. One of the main arguments against any move away from private for-profit health insurance has been that "rationing of care", which happens at every private insurance provider as well for fairly obvious reasons, would lead to many people not receiving the care they need when they need it.

Well, according to this study, US Americans receive less timely care than people living in the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Two of those countries offer government-run health care plans while the others focus on insurance provided by very strictly regulated private non-profit healthcare providers.

Based on this study, the entire "rationed care" argument appears to be bogus.

On the other hand, it is also interesting that Canada's TOC rating is the lowest. Canada is often cited in US media outlets as an example for a country with government-run health-care where people have to wait ages for specific medical procedures. If the study is to be trusted, those criticisms are not entirely off the mark. But then, Canadians do pay a lot less for their healthcare insurance which probably makes a slightly less timely care easier to accept. (If my HMO offered to sell me insurance at 50% of the price if I would tolerate ~20% extra wait for care services, I would certainly make the switch.)

All that being said, I am not sure if it makes sense to include a small country such as New Zealand in this type of study. Large and diverse countries with 50+ million inhabitants do face fairly different challenges than comparably tiny and homogeneous ones. What might work in New Zealand or even the Netherlands does not necessarily have to work nearly as well in a much larger country. (I am not trying to snub clever healthcare implementations in small countries, for the record.)

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

On the other hand, it is also interesting that Canada's TOC rating is the lowest.

It is the thing that gets grumbled about most often but I can't say that I have any complaints from my own experience nor those that I have known who have used the system. Actually that's not entirely true. If you suffer from a chronic condition it can be quite arduous. If you have cancer you get in pretty quick. If you have a bad knee you will likely get bumped a few times. It's not that chronic conditions aren't debilitating but the triage is biased toward life saving measures.