I think you're probably right - Americans have been carefully conditioned by a lot of groups to believe that anything socialized = anything communized = anything Soviet, and that the Soviets never did anything right. I'm not even going to get into that part of the argument, because it's not important. What's important is that the American insurance companies, in conjunction with a lot of right-leaning think tanks and their media outlets, have carefully constructed a worst-case scenario as a straw man. The actual fact is that socialized medicine in America would look a lot like American medicine looks now. The faces would be the same, the buildings would be the same, the procedures and suppliers would be the same. Two things would change: the red tape required to pay for anything as it wends its way through an obstacle course of insurance forms and offices, and the level of access. The first would improve dramatically for practically everybody. Few co-pays or none, one health card or one form to fill out, everyone (whether in a state or at the national level) billing the same government office. The second would improve dramatically too, for the people who had reduced access before.
Here's the kicker, though: the people who care enough to vote, the people who pay the taxes and make contributions to politicians? They're in the group for whom access would not improve. All of a sudden, approximately 20% (more, depending on which stats you believe) of the population would have access to medical care, and in dealing with the influx, the people who used to get same-day service and surgeries in two weeks might find themselves waiting a bit. If their surgeries weren't urgent, they might find themselves waiting more than a bit. (I just waited two months for a hysterectomy. Mind you, that was fine with me - I needed that time to get things together for an extended absence at work, and I was expecting a wait for an elective surgery. Would I have been so accepting of that wait if I'd known what I'd be going through in February, or if I'd expected to be squeezed in the following week? Probably not. It's about differeing expectations.)
When you're less than two decades out of a massive social upheaval, you can expect things to not be functioning quite smoothly. Hungary (and yes, I CAN find it on a map) has European ideals but a struggling second-world economy, and I would have been surprised to learn that the medical system ran smoothly in that situation. It's interesting to get the perspective on it, though.
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Here's the kicker, though: the people who care enough to vote, the people who pay the taxes and make contributions to politicians? They're in the group for whom access would not improve. All of a sudden, approximately 20% (more, depending on which stats you believe) of the population would have access to medical care, and in dealing with the influx, the people who used to get same-day service and surgeries in two weeks might find themselves waiting a bit. If their surgeries weren't urgent, they might find themselves waiting more than a bit. (I just waited two months for a hysterectomy. Mind you, that was fine with me - I needed that time to get things together for an extended absence at work, and I was expecting a wait for an elective surgery. Would I have been so accepting of that wait if I'd known what I'd be going through in February, or if I'd expected to be squeezed in the following week? Probably not. It's about differeing expectations.)
When you're less than two decades out of a massive social upheaval, you can expect things to not be functioning quite smoothly. Hungary (and yes, I CAN find it on a map) has European ideals but a struggling second-world economy, and I would have been surprised to learn that the medical system ran smoothly in that situation. It's interesting to get the perspective on it, though.
Thanks for stopping by.