Private health care is not good by any stretch of the mind, but universal health care is no better because it sacrifices quality and affordability. If it’s supplied to everyone then it’s not going to cover much other than the bare minimum and it’s going to require a lot of money. And of course we know where that funding is coming from.
@Emory Instead of derailing the unpopular opinions thread, I thought I'd respond to this in a new thread, so you can have my full opinion on it. To disclose, I'm not entirely against private healthcare and could see how the system could objectively work, but the US is in a peculiar situation with its medical system that makes it grotesque.
In terms of Healthcare comparisons between my country and the US (Canada vs the US), it costs the average American 2-3 times as much as it does for me in my country so that a quarter of the population can be effectively enslaved to medical debt in exchange for a system that gives Americans a lower lifespan and higher infant mortality rate, just so they can watch 4.5 billion get sucked away and not distributed back into the medical system by insurance alone.
To add insult to injury, medical expenses account for around 28.5% of the US Government's federal budget, part of which is spent on medicare. Which means the US does have public healthcare, it's just a horribly malformed monstrosity that is choked to death by private interest groups who slit the throat of its taxpayers with medical debt. The US system also has a stunning rate of fatalities as a result of doctor error, and an opioid crisis that has largely stemmed from how laissez-faire American doctors are with throwing out prescriptions for pain killers.
And in case you thought you could find refuge in wait times, don't worry, depending on where you live, the United States is a complete fucking disaster there too.
Oh, and in terms of GDP spent on Healthcare, Canada ranks in at 10.6% of its total GDP (2016) in contrast to the United States' 17.2% as according to the OECD, so even by economic standards, Canada spends less to get at least as much if not in some cases more coverage and care than their US counterparts.
According to every reliable source of data available that doesn't have a conservative spin to it, the US medical system is a grotesque disaster spurred on by the out of control dominance of Insurance Companies. If Insurance Companies weren't in the picture, it's very possible that your private system would be an efficient machine, as hospitals would only really charge what they needed plus a little to make some money. And, by all rights, my country's medical system shouldn't be remotely comparable--we have far fewer people to tax spread over a greater range of physical space. Response times should destroy the efficacy of my system in contrast to yours, but it isn't that way. It isn't that way because the US medical system imploded a long time ago.
Now, that being said...
- The United States is still a leader in medical research across the globe.
- The United States pays its doctors better than Canada does.
- Canada does have longer waiting times for some procedures and surgeries as compared to the United States. I think the average waiting time now is 20 weeks for some surgeries. This is a problem that needs to be fixed.
We're generally happy with our level of care, in spite of its flaws and deficiencies, and if you compare the US system to a more functional public healthcare system like the NHS in the UK, it is utterly eviscerated.
As a personal note, I've had to use my medical system several times. Sometimes for job-related injuries (I worked as a Security Guard at concerts and the like for a while) and sometimes for personal reasons (it turns I have Asthma, and lung damage). I've never seen the post-apocalyptic waiting times people talk about. I got in to see a specialist about my lungs in under 14 days and had the information back about it the next day. I've never had to pay more than 40 dollars on medication, when I've even had to pay for medication.
So, if the US spends so much on healthcare, why is it blatantly worse in several aspects?
Well, let's look at how money is spent.
In my public healthcare system, tax money is taken and spent on the system. Some of it is lost to bureaucratic inefficiency, but the majority of it reaches doctors, hospitals, and medical supplies.
In the United States' private healthcare system, the money taken in by insurance companies is spent on some of the most expensive lobbying in the United States, and cold hard cash payouts to shareholders and CEO's in the form of profit sharing. Because of the profit motive, every insurance company has literally every motivation to pay out as little as is humanly possible on actual healthcare, and would instead prefer to spend that on multimillion dollar bribes, company payouts, or simply keeping it as a profit at the end of the day.
"Well, you don't have to pay for insurance!"
You don't, but, have fun paying 16,000 dollars for a single surgery. Adam Ruins Everything summarizes this in a more entertaining way than I could, so, I'll just link it.
Aaand... That's about it, I guess.
tl;dr: "Private vs Public" is the wrong question in the US concerning the problems with US healthcare. It's how massively corrupt the healthcare system is because of insurance companies, and a government that is in bed with them because of lobbying. Cull the insurance networks and hospital fees would drop significantly, or, assimilate the insurance networks into a single payee healthcare system such as what the UK possesses. Either way would reasonably work.