re: Has anyone lived in a country with universal healthcare?

I'm a CDN who went to school at LSU then worked in the state for 7 yrs before moving back to Great White north.... i have had kids in US and canada ... not much different in care except cdn system kept mother/baby in hospital for a cpl of days rather than discharged next day. Parents and in laws have had major health issues and in cdn system there are wait times for some procedures eg knee replacements, there is no wait for cardiac or cancer treatments. As someone who has seen both, i would choose universal care. Its not cheap, there is no free lunch.
I have lots of friends family in medical fields and they are not jumping ship to US. No system is perfect but less administration and profit gouging in universal care system. Flame away ....

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Universal healthcare is great if you have a small, highly educated population that doesn't take advantage of the system. I don't think that exists except in some norwegian countries maybe.

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i'd be a full socialist if we lived in Norwegian countries or Canada because it makes sense if you have a low poverty rate and almost 0 immigration. or if your immigration is lateral movement, not laborers from third world countries.

You can have socialism or you can have immigration/welfare state. you can't have both.


hell even though i'm completely opposed to him, 2015 Bernie Sanders at least made sense because he wanted to close the border and implement his brand of socialism.

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theyre getting as fat and overrun with refugees as the rest of us, it will come crashing down

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agreed they are, but there's a lot of insulation (land mass between them and the third world) for them and Canada that England, France, Italy, and the US don't have.

American healthcare system is one of the biggest scams going

U.S. Healthcare would be untouchable if we could cut down on the egregious greed at the administrative level.

It had absolutely SKYROCKETED in the last 15 years.

Lived in UK for three years. Hated it. My employer paid for supplemental private health care and l would take care of a lot of things on trips back to the states.

The treatment and medical advancement is not up to speed to compared US, it could be but they don’t allow it to try and control cost. You could wait for months for a basic x-ray. When my kids had strep they woud let them suffer for up to two weeks to see if they got rid of it naturally before giving them antibiotics. Had a coworker with a double hernia. His surgery was scheduled 3 months out. He used his private supplemental insurance and had it within a week from same doctors.

I could go on and on with how bad the NHS. Now there have been reports it’s going broke.

The bottom line is all systems have flaws. It’s which flaws do you want to deal with. From my experience I’d still take the US system.

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6.) A lot of foreigners from India, Vietnam, and China were doctors there.

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Speaking of India, I am not really a racist dude, except when it comes to doctors from India. Anyone else the same way?

Not the ones who were born in America, but the ones who came to the US and got their education here and now practices here (or in your case, ones who were from India then moved to Australia.

It did help out a lot of people. I remember when it first passed and one of the first people to sign up for it was John Boehner.

A good friend of mine's mother benefited from it when she had to be treated for cancer. Without it, it would have cost her a lot more money. While it might not have benefited everyone, it did help a lot of people as well.

I'm going to point out(like i do in every universal healthcare thread) that we ALREADY pay for the young that can't afford healthcare and the old(most expensive) in our current medicare/medicade system.

Who doesn't benefit from that system? The people paying for it....you and me. So yeah, let's keep throwing money at the private for profit insurance companies that stand between us(the people paying for everything) and health care.

This is really a no brainer folks....it actually astounds me that no one on this message board can do simple math.

Disclaimer: I have good friends who are doctors and I worked for big pharma for almost 50 years.

Doctors hate universal Healthcare because the government will tell them what to do and when to do it. They panic at the thought of working for the government for a set fee per patient.

The drug companies hate it probably more than the doctors because the government will drastically cut what they get for their pills, inhalers, oral meds, injectables, etc.

The insurance companies hate it because they make tons of money selling health policies that likely would not be written under a national health program.

All of these groups (AMA, PMA, and NAIC) Have huge lobbying groups feeding the sacred cows in Washington. Together, they are a lot bigger than NRA.