Quote:
Originally Posted by Arles
There are a ton of health insurance companies in Europe right now. Supplemental insurance is big business. Companies like Allianz, Generali and AXA do massive business and we would have a similar situation here. To get the same level of response most employer-provided care does today under a single payer, you would have to pay for supplemental insurance. If you want to get an ACL tear fixed in 2-3 weeks, you will need better care than the national single payer.
It's not removing the insurance companies that makes the difference, it's setting the price caps. Insurance companies don't want to pay $500 for a prescription drug, they would love to only pay $40. Whether we have private insurance companies or not, the price caps are the only thing that is guaranteed to control costs. If you removed the price caps from Europe tomorrow, their entire system would fall apart (even within the state-provided plans).
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I don't necessarily agree or disagree with your reasoning about caps, but I am thoroughly confused as to how it fits into your argument that you don't want the government controlling your healthcare? Yes Europe can do universal healthcare at much cheaper costs than the US can run it's private system, but only by capping pharmaceutical prices, which you're not sure that the US will implement properly, so you 'd rather continue to pay effectively double for health care as long as your tax bill doesn't rise?