Crunching Numbers for Healthcare

But you have the option to buy additional care if you want faster treatments or those not covered by NHS. We have presidential candidates who willingly support letting people who can't afford health insurance / care to be withheld treatment and possibly die.

And crowds who, rather than deplore and reject these candidates, cheer them on.

Bear in mind, a lot of the people against government funded healthcare don't seem to be worried about the results as much; they just feel that the government taking control of an industry is wrong in and of itself.

Those people are also known as idiots. Government's basic goal is to keep society functioning (and part of that is making sure that the people who live in it are healthy). A corporation's basic goal is to make money. Which entity makes more sense as the provider of health care?

Indeed so. Unless your government is a corrupt beast that makes News International the most transparent company in the world, state-funded healthcare can't be as bad as that of a company who's main goal is to please shareholders and not society or even the individuals it serves.

It's in the best interest of a cost-cutting government to have a population that takes the minimum amount of tax dollars to maintain in good happy health. It's in the best interest of medical corporations and insurers to have a population that survives long and is constantly in need of expensive medical attention.

When we look at a lot of American medical advancements I notice that they are mostly pharmaceutical based and are in fact usually not very useful. In comparison, Canada, which spends much less on R&D has produced insulin and now a HIV vaccine as just some of the examples of non-profit academic research.

I take it numbers about medicare would also be apropos, no?

Mitch Daniels (Gov R-IN) warns that Medicare will "implode," however in the article is a link explaining that Medicare is Solvent up until 2024, at which point it will still be able to pay out 90% of its obligations. The dedicated taxes will no longer be enough, but it will not be over taxed so much as to cause it to implode. Furthermore, by 2085, the program will probably still be able to pay out 88% of its obligations.

That's assuming we never resolve any efficiency problems and just keep going with more and more expensive symptom treatment methods.

If we were to implement preventative care in Canada, we could probably maintain healthcare costs for a few decades before we'd need to find something else to keep healthcare costs at a constant % of GDP.

But that'd mean proving government can fix what business cant!

Yeah I guess those numbers I posted where I'm comparing 30k to 8k isn't enough :P