Is the U.S. Healthcare System Overpriced and Underperforming?

[gravenewworld]

why not have a mandatory healthcare tax taken out of paychecks which could be used for healthcare? that way if someone needs to use the hospital, but has no healthcare, the amount that was taken out of the paycheck could be used to pay for some of the costs. if there was any money that was left over after a person retired it could then be rolled over into a retirement account (this could even help with the huge problem that Americans have with saving money for retirement). also, give people incentives for preventitive measures instead of always looking for a cure. offer tax breaks for people who live healthy lifestyles. public transportation in this country is also terrible. the better the public transportation, the more people are willing to walk to get to places. I believe it was Portland (or possibly Seattle) that is pretty much the only city in the county that has bike paths/side walks for people to use to get in an out of the city. And Guess what? They happen to be one of the fittest cities in America.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

why not have a mandatory healthcare tax taken out of paychecks which could be used for healthcare? that way if someone needs to use the hospital, but has no healthcare, the amount that was taken out of the paycheck could be used to pay for some of the costs. if there was any money that was left over after a person retired it could then be rolled over into a retirement account (this could even help with the huge problem that Americans have with saving money for retirement). also, give people incentives for preventitive measures instead of always looking for a cure. offer tax breaks for people who live healthy lifestyles. public transportation in this country is also terrible. the better the public transportation, the more people are willing to walk to get to places. I believe it was Portland (or possibly Seattle) that is pretty much the only city in the county that has bike paths/side walks for people to use to get in an out of the city. And Guess what? They happen to be one of the fittest cities in America.

Not a bad idea, I think I mentioned Arnold Schwarzenegger's thinking of bringing it in in California bloody socialist Two states already have this. I can't remember which ones I think it's in the OP article.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Actually, no, you never did acknowledge until just now that the numbers are out of date, and you still haven't provided an argument for why out of date numbers are valid, when I have shown that there is quite a bit of difference over 15 years.

Ie, while we may be 28th (in the link I provided), but the difference between us and the top (I took Andorra off, though...I think you would agree that it is out of line with the others and not really relevant anyway) is only 4.8%. Would you seriously consider that to be a major problem? How about in light of the improvement over the past 100 years? (life expectancies are roughly double what they were 100 years ago) I gave you the new numbers and you have not commented on them. And I gave you the explanation for it, and for which you responded with a non-factual conjecture.

Also of note is the way the statistics are read. When you deal in single-digit fractions of 1000, differences are amplified over, say, using the survival rate. Ie, an infant's odds of surviving their first year in the US are about 99.3%, while they are, 99.5% in the UK. That doesn't look like a real problem to me. That is meaningless for telling us what the quality of care is. None of that is meaningful, for reasons already stated and not addressed by you. Start defending your point or withdraw it (or we will do it for you again). And as already shown, that is just plain wrong. Well, ok, if that's what you want. If you get cancer or heart disease, you may change your mind, since the actual quality of care (measured by survival rate) is better in the US. The US is certainly not perfect - no country is. But both your figures and logic are inaccurate/misleading/outdated as already shown. There are quite a lot of things about the US system that are the best in the world and quite a lot of others that are comparable to other countries. The primary shortcoming of the US system is in the healthcare for the number that are uninsured, but that problem is not the disaster that some people imply. The tendancy, though, is for people such as yourself to argue a point that implies a rich-poor disparity that has the rich being the few percent at the top and the poor being everyone else and implying that healthcare is only good for that few percent while it is dismal for everyone else. The reality, however, is that while it is certainly true that the healthcare for our poor is worse than the healthcare for a similar fraction of the people in Europe, it is also true that healthcare for the other ~85% of the population is better in the US than in Europe. So if you want to use that as a stick to beat the US with, ok, but watch out for the other end of the stick!: we need to improve healthcare for 15% of our population and you need to improve it for 85% of yours!

13.4% GDP compared to Englands 6.6% GDP? It's not any better now.

Little bit biased but apparently they've become worse

It was implied, and I'm going to ignore you now as your not acknowledging there is a problem, even though there obviously is? Stop playing check the figures.

Two figures that should worry you.

46 million people without health insurance.

14.1% GDP

and ranked 28th in the world, behind most of Europes healthcare providers.

'nuff said I really couldn't care less about playing hunt the statistic, it's irrelevant, and all this crap about premature babies is just a smokescreen, we have the same treatments you do, your not talking about some Eastern Bloc country here.

Unless you can adimit you have a problem then there never will be a solution.

OK I'm a poor European who doesn't know your system, fine, it sucks anyway.