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Universal health care
(lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21571844
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Universal healthcare is much, much better than what the US has. Not only is it cheaper, but it's just a better system, even if you're relatively well off.
Having said that, I do wonder where they got the 5% and 20% figures from. The US system is very wasteful, but not 4x as bad as a Universal system.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita
The second graph supports the general claim, with several countries ranging between a quarter and half as much as US costs. We can take a look at that graph and see that $10,000 figure for the US, and then go look at the $2,500-3,000 range and find several countries there that have much longer lifespans.
Both Israel and South Korea have universal health care but of course the details for everything are highly relevant. Anyway, I think we can safely say that your conclusion above, that the US system is not four times as bad as a universal system, is presumably false, based on the Israel counterexample.
Looking at "Table 1", the 2022 value for the US is 12,555 in PPP international dollars. 1/4 of that would be 3139. The only countries below 3200 are countries with a significantly lower development level than the US: Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Turkey, Slovakia, Chile, Hungary, Poland, Greece and so on.
US peer countries in terms of development would be countries like Germany, France, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Denmark, UK, Japan, etc. Of those, only Japan and the UK are below 6278, which would be half the cost of the US system. Canada is close though at 6319. And some, like Germany and Switzerland are closer to 3/4 of the US costs.
I think it's more fair to say that the US could have a much better healthcare system that also covered everybody in the country for half the cost if it switched to a Universal system. To be able to do it for 1/4 the cost, the US would have to have an economy like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, etc. Wages and costs would have to be significantly lower. To put it in perspective, as a Canadian if they think they'd have a functional healthcare system if the funding was cut in half. I can pretty much guarantee you they'd say no.