Personal blog of Kelly Sutton.
Because they don’t know they have it. A commenter points me to this:
At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
“I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,’ ” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”
One of the truly amazing and depressing things about the health reform debate is the persistence of fear-mongering over “socialized medicine” even though we already have a system in which the government pays substantially more medical bills (47% of the total) than the private insurance industry (35%).
In a way, this is the flip side of the persistent belief that the free market can cure healthcare, even though there are no places where it actually has; people also believe that government-provided insurance can’t work, even though there are many places where it does — and one of those places is the United States of America.
And if there were widespread understanding about the differences between a single-payer system for health insurance (Canada) and a nationalized health care system (U.K.), there would be more support for the compromise position (having a public option). But even Harvard economists get that wrong, and when it comes to health care, repeated demonstration of total incomprehension doesn’t jeopardize your invitations to opine on the subject.
My personal experiences with health care abroad and at home give me an informed opinion that other companies are doing it right. I paid 20 Euros for an urgent care visit relating to temporarily losing my hearing in Düsseldorf, Germany 2 years ago. Compare that with the $600 copay I had to fork over for an urgent care (but simple) X-ray?
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