A Medicare levy, while not ideal, is a fair system. You don't pay it if you don't pay tax, it is proportionate to your income, and it allows a basic level of care for those who need it. Everybody needs eye checks. Poor people get them for free. People earning an income pay for them.
Could you back that up? Are you talking about a specific country, or all manners of private healthcare?
As far as I can tell, the least regulated bits of healthcare systems that people pay out of pocket for tend to have done the best in terms of cost control.
Eg few if any insurances around the world pays for laser eye surgery. And it's one of the few common healthcare procedures whose costs have dropped massively in recent decades.
> A Medicare levy, while not ideal, is a fair system. You don't pay it if you don't pay tax, it is proportionate to your income, and it allows a basic level of care for those who need it. Everybody needs eye checks. Poor people get them for free. People earning an income pay for them.
That seems like a good argument in favour of taxing the well-to-do to give the poor money. That's a fine decision for a democracy to make.
But I don't see the argument of forcing the poor to spend that money on healthcare instead of letting them decide what's best for themselves. Do you know what they need better than them?
I don't know that an elective procedure is the best example, but it's still an example. One counter is prescription drugs. My insurance would only allow a small number of tablets for my migraine medication because the cost for them was so artificially high. When I called the insurance company to ask why they wouldn't pay for the number of tablets that I needed, I was told that my doctor should do a better job of controlling the number of migraines that I get. Where do I get this medication now that I don't have insurance? From countries that have socialized medicine, and the cost is substantially less. Unreasonably high costs for prescription meds in the US is not unusual. I recently had to take doxycycline for Lyme disease. Back in 2012, this cost 6 cents per dose. That price increased by over 6,000 in one year, just as Lyme cases were also skyrocketing.
In any case, the socialized health care probably doesn't cover the drugs that get to exported to foreigners like you?
> Unreasonably high costs for prescription meds in the US is not unusual.
Yes, that's a separate problem.
Enabling (re-) imports is an important safety valve. Medical tourism is another.
Ideally, the US would fix their healthcare system. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
In terms of letting the poor spend it on what they like, I disagree. You aren't giving them money. You're giving them healthcare. In my opinion, people are not entitled to money. But I do think they are entitled to good health if it can be at all given to them.
I'd say that if as a society we want to help (poor) people, we should do whatever provides the most bang for the buck; ie the highest quality of life improvement at the lowest burden to the rest of society and the smallest disincentive effects.
But yes, if you explicitly want to restrict what poor people can do, then your position is a consistent one.
They also quantify the degree to which private providers can "recover" costs for pre-existing conditions. E.g. mandatory wait-out periods and relatively minor penalties, and then they have to provide full cover.
But beyond some of those items, they pretty much let the private providers run it as a business. You can decent cover for as low as $60, but if you want additional benefits and ad-hoc medical spending-money, you pay more obviously. Some of them even have packages that are reduced based on they person's salary to make it more affordable for low-income families.
