It’s good to know there are some Brits happy with the NHS only option, but the fiasco they put my daughter through to treat and follow-up on a simple throat infection a few years back convinced her to never be without the private option again.
I had problems with throat, sinus and chest infections for ten years of my life from the age of 9 to the age of 19, so I can sympathise. Every other time I went into the clinic the doctor referred me to hospital for blood tests, chest x-rays, some horrific thing where they wash your sinuses out with saltwater that was absolutely atrocious, and failing to find any underlying cause for my shitty respiratory tract the treatment each time was antibiotics. Which cleared it up every time. Apart from the one time it was mono, which they caught on the spot and treated.
Eight years later and here I am hale and hearty. Turned out my constant respiratory tract problems were due to my mum's insistence upon smoking in the house, evinced by the fact they stopped when I moved out. I have no idea why your daughter went through such a polava to get treated for a chest infection, the only reason that springs to mind is that she's a non-EU foreign citizen although I really don't know how the system works for foreign citizens, or even those here with tourist/ student visas and whatnot. Frankly I'm not happy about foreigners being able to come here and leech the fuck off my tax money, especially when the arrangement is not reciprocal, but hey. Of course she might be an NHS Card-carrying British citizen in which case it's an unfortunate incident, but not one I've had experience of. And, according to the so-called "postcode lottery", the place I grew up, Knowsley, is supposedly covered by one of the worst Local Health Authorities in the UK.
I do know, however, that the Foreign Office strongly cautions against travelling to the United States without insurance, because having the temerity to fall ill in the land of the free could end up bankrupting you.
So for many it’s not an option at all. And don’t forget, any individual can walk into any emergency room here for initial treatment with no true obligation of repayment thus adding to our overall costs.
Yes, the initial treatment is all well and good, but what happens when you walk your insurance-less hide into an A&E after having done yourself an injury that might require follow-up treatment, such as physiotherapy, psychotherapy or just more drugs?
But the truth is it’s difficult to compare costs because most Yanks get insurance through their employer and have no idea what the actual premium is, particularly since the size of the company makes an enormous difference in that cost.
And that doesn't strike you as a system open to abuse? Name your price, Mr Insurer; if the companies want to keep their employees happy they'll pay whatever the frig you tell them to. What else are they going to do, get their healthcare for free like they do on Pinko Island?
I interpreted Big Jim’s comparison statement to the cost of a self-employed individual who has no leverage in premium bids across the relatively small pool of competing companies within a respective state. Opening the competition nationally would level the playing field somewhat.
If it's the case that insurance companies operate in this way then changing it would help the US private healthcare market immensely, and I'd be very surprised if that isn't part of Obama's healthcare reforms. Seems like the sort of thing he'd do, being a centre-right man as he is.
The problem isn’t a lack of viable solutions to the cost issue here; the problem is that the solutions rub those holding the keys the wrong way combined with a spineless set of politicians unwilling to confront them.
That's the problem with every private market though. Take the commodity out of the hands of profiteers and it goes away. In Britain, private health insurance companies like BUPA HAVE to price their policies competetively, because if they charge too much people will ignore the shit out of them and get their healthcare free. Sure, it might seem "wrong" to market capitalists to have private corporations forced to compete against a leviathan funded by guaranteed money from the public purse, but at the end of the day the "target market" they're fighting over are sick people.
