One isn’t better than the other. There are trade offs. Your preference appears to be financial.
It's prioritized as per need, for example elective/preventative operations or procedures will be delayed if there is a new higher level emergency, this makes practical sense given the nature of healthcare and I have never had a problem with that.
It's slightly off topic though, my comment was off the cuff but it's a reality.
> Your preference appears to be financial.
Well regardless of financial accessibility if you can justify why in the US the markup of pharmaceuticals is so extraordinarily high for everything vs the rest of the world ?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9914690/figure/heal...
I would be VERY nervous to be in the US without fully comp insurance.
We do a lot of the (very expensive) drug discovery and testing.
They charge more in the US because they can, because of people who gleefully accept it and defend it by saying "we do a lot of expensive drug discovery and testing"
Where are the costs, and what would it take to break tyem down?
For example if the costs are in screening molecular candidates, that could be done in a lab on a computer in India or Vietnam just as easily as in New Jersey. If its clinical trials, Europe is cheap and Asia cheaper still, both with high quality medical staff. Etc.
Any commenters understand where the major costs are?
On the other hand, when I've gone to that clinic with urgent issues, they see me the same day.
I gather it is much the same in systems with decent healthcare systems; just much, much, much less likely to bankrupt you just for being sick.
Hell, I recently had to find a new dentist because the one I had been going to for years suddenly had 4-6 month lead time if I needed to reschedule a routine cleaning.
ER visits are an all night endeavor.
Even though this does make sense if you think about it as a tiered support system. If my finger joints don't come back up, my general practitioner can see that, poke at the fingers a bit and decide if guided physio makes sense - no need for more expertise. If there are subtle breaks in the joint requiring attention - more expertise is needed.
Especially with emergency care it’s quite fast. Back in August my son fell off the monkey bars and his elbow exploded. Ambulance in 7 mins. Hospital triage in 5 mins. Doctor 5 mins after. X-ray took 5 mins. Waited 7 mins. Diagnosis and sent to Children’s hospital one town over. More x-rays, surgery prep, surgery with two paediatric orthopaedic surgeons, four steel pins inserted, post-op, sleep, and he was home by 7am. Three more checkups with the main surgeon followed over the months.
Cost us $8 in parking. Never even saw a bill. I would never, ever, trade this for the American approach. I need to know that every kid on that playground gets this exact same level of care.
I don’t mean talk in vague assertions about how you have read some other specific yet unrelated anecdotes about childbirth costing $125,000 or something. I mean how much would your son’s specific situation cost you in a comparable area of America for a family of comparable income?
The reason I ask is because the general approach should not be argued against with anecdotes. You commonly hear of wait time issues in universal healthcare countries. You commonly hear about cost of care issues in America. Generally speaking there is an obvious trade off.
And just like wait times and cost are preferences, your preference is equal care for children. In America that does not happen. That is part of the trade off.
I am not implying that all things are equal. I am unhappy with the health insurance cartels that drive up cost in America making the lower middle class suffer. I am unhappy with the inconsistent care availability from region to region across the country.
But I also resist the implication that American healthcare always bankrupts a person and that free / low cost care is a simple decision.
That's the fun thing about the US system. The only way to find out how much it costs is to wait for the bill. So while your question is a fair one, logically speaking, it's unanswerable in practice.
It still cost 3 or 4 thousand dollars. So it's not necessarily those six figure costs that are tough to deal with but even routine hospital care that gets very expensive in the US. I'm fortunate that we can afford that cost. But for a lot of people even making the payments on that would be a hardship. We didn't even know it would cost that much even though we had called our insurance to try to figure it out. Nobody can tell you how much it will cost until you incur the cost which is absurd. And the hospital "price lists" are beyond useless.
It shouldn't cost anything to birth a child in a hospital setting like a birth center in any civilized country, and we shouldn't have to deal with billing issues and insurance companies in the insane first 12 weeks of a child's life when we're sleep deprived and just dealing with actual medical issues and adjustment. We've spent collectively hours on the phone with insurance for this and various other charges. The "private payer" "employer provided" system constantly produces bad experiences and outcomes for everyone. Every insurance provider I've had over the past 5 years is a company that constantly screws up and that I can't fire, unlike my car insurance.
The American healthcare system doesn't bankrupt us right away, but it does so slowly by bleeding us for costs we shouldn't have to pay and by robbing us of time right when we need it most.
I’ve waited far longer in US hospitals and paid hundreds of dollars AFTER insurance.
But if you're on the US, just go to Mexico (or maybe some central american country or Brazil)
