Cost of Medical Care : My 96 year old mother went to the ER last month and spent 5 days in the hospital. The bill for hospital services alone (No ambulance or doctors fees) was $18,477.06 .          Yes, she has Medicare that pays most of it. BUT how would a person in an accident or sick and without insurance pay for a bill like this ???????              Even more extreme, my daughter was hit by a drunk driver (the Ba...rd's 3rd DUI) she spent 21 days in ICU, the medical expenses in the 3&1/2 years since are in excess of 2 MILLION dollars and will continue to rise for the rest of her life.   It is a good thing my son-in-law has good insurance because the walking corpse had everything in his wife's name since his first DUI.....       Medical insurance IS NOT A LUXURY in this day and age.      

IMO, health care is a mess. I , based on everything I've seen, I only see it heading downhill. I'm on record. The past is just a prelude.

To All -
I agree that changes were needed, and as I've said before, simply outlawing preexisting condition exclusions and lifetime maximum benefits would have solved 90% of the problem.  Obamacare did both, thankfully, but it then went too far with the subsidies.
Insurance is like anything else - supply and demand.  The law should have simply required everyone to procure insurance in a given degree of coverage, like we do for auto insurance, and stopped there.
The reason that health insurance has always been expensive is that insurance is a risk spreading device.  The insurer collects premium from low and high risk people, and from that basket of dollars, pays out claims.
Before, young healthy people we free to not buy health insurance, effectively denying the insurer those premium dollars from the low risk group.  So the insurer is left insuring the high risk group, generally middle age and older folks, who have claims.
You can either require everyone to buy insurance, without subsidies, or require everyone to pay tax into a gov't run system.  Effect is the same for coverage, except that anytime the gov't runs anything, it's less efficient and more costly than private companies doing the same.
Of course gov't has to provide for the armed forces, police, fire protection, highways, and other essential gov't functions.  Health insurance isn't one of them.

Stats like these tell only the part of the story that the writer wants to be told.  For instance, what are the malpractice laws in each of these countries?  Can a patient who is the victim of professional negligence get a legal recovery from the person whose negligence injured or killed him?  If the medical providers have immunity, or if the laws of that country limit recovery, of course care is cheaper there.
What are the average wages of all of the staff involved from the surgeon, to the OR nurse, to the after surgery docs and nurses, all of the way down to the janitor who cleans up the OR after the procedure?
You have to compare apples to apples.  In the U.S., a surgical nurse earns more money than does a surgeon in many parts of the world.  Some countries give immunity to their national health service providers, while others severely restrict recovery.

if you believe that government provided health care is the way to go, we'll put you in the VA and see what you think of that.   [/quote]

I've been in our local VAMC system for over 5 years & have no complaints or issues
co pay on  meds is my only cash outlay

I think cobra made a point.

thumperclone wrote on 06/28/15 at 10:31:14:


I've been in our local VAMC system for over 5 years & have no complaints or issues
co pay on  meds is my only cash outlay

[/quote]
but we have vets in other places unable to receive treatment
Austin doesn't have a VA hospital, and travel pay is given to a vet after arrival if he has to travel to a VA facility, or that's how it was back then
Know what my old man was doing when he wound up a cripple for the 3 years he lasted before he died?
Walking from Austin to the nearest VA hospital in SA to get treatment because he was unemployed at that time and didn't have a car or money for a bus ticket
20 years of service, veteran of a foreign war, and he either was hit by a car or fell asleep on his feet walking and fell from an overpass (those are our two best guesses, he had no memory of the incident) because the VA wouldn't let hum go to a local hospital because it was too expensive
Yay government insurance
they did take good care of my mom, after she reache retirement age (she was already in a nursing home)