saxitoxin wrote:Dukasaur wrote:Yes, I waited a couple months for an MRI. So what?
If I ever had to have an MRI I would want and expect it within 72 hours regardless of the reason.
Eliminating waiting periods involves creating excess capacity. Regardless of what system you use, excess capacity cost big bucks. It's a huge waste building twice as many MRI machines as you need just so people have the luxury of 72-hour service for non-essential procedures. That kind of stupid wastefulness is going to cost you. Regardless of whether it's a government-run system and you pay for it with your taxes, or it's a privately-run system and you pay for it with your fees, it will cost you big bucks to have that kind of redundancy in the system.
saxitoxin wrote:Dukasaur wrote:My wife, who has exceptionally bad health, has gotten several key surgeries, two of them for life threatening conditions. If I had to pay for them, there's no way I could have come up the money. She'd be dead now.
If you were in the United States, not only would you not have to pay for them* she would have received superior care from the nation who - in all likelihood - developed and invented the procedures she underwent.
* Unless you're someone who drives without a seat belt, holds lits fireworks, and chooses not to purchase health insurance, that is.
When you're a typical American wage-slave, barely surviving on your minimum wage job, deciding to put your last $500 each month on the rent instead of on health insurance isn't much of a choice. The devil or the deep blue sea. If you don't pay the rent, you'll be out in the cold and probably dead soon. If you don't pay the health insurance, you may be dead when cancer comes knocking, but that might not be for another 20 years. Lot of rent payments between now and then....
Don't play stupid. People being kept in poverty through your employment policies have enough to do to pay the rent and heat. Out -of-pocket health insurance is within their reach like a Maserati.
Oh, and paranthetically, Canadian healthcare outcomes are significantly better than American outcomes.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/interactives/2017/july/mirror-mirror/
