Due to my own stupidity I fell off my bike on the weekend. A few minutes later I realised my little finger was swelling up and hurting a whole lot.

Universal healthcare let me go to a hospital get 3 x-rays and a doctor to tell me nothing was broken. Took 3 hours, but multiple people apologised for it taking so long while I was there (to be honest, I thought it was quick. A sore finger must just about be last on the list of emergency room priorities.)

Total out-of-pocket to me: $0.

I expect if I was in the US i'd currently be sitting here awaiting a bill for several thousand dollars.

Huh ? I'm glad that your finger is better, but you procedure was not 'out-of-pocket' $0. Here in Canada, where the similar treatment would be $0 at the time of treatment, I would've paid in thousands already into the health care system in federal/provincial pay deductions. I consider, the money lost to be a continuous out of pocket expenditure. I still like this system more tbh.

The out-of-pocket was 0 in the sense that my tax is already paid and there was no additional expense in me choosing to go to hospital to be checked out.

So, yes, I pay for it. A big chunk of my pay packet goes to tax, but i'm happy knowing I can receiving good treatment without having to work out if I can afford it.

I'm also happy it means those less fortunate than myself (re: current income levels) will receive the same level of treatment.

After hitting the road and dusting myself off, it meant I didn't have to do a cost/benefit analysis of going to hospital vs. walking it off.

And I really can't emphasize enough how much it sucks to do a cost/benefit analysis on going to the hospital or not. A couple of years ago my girlfriend and I were on crappy insurance (i.e. catastrophic coverage only) because that's all we could afford. She had a medium level concussion and we were debating the cost of going or not. Going and getting a cat scan was a sure way to spend $2,000 that we simply did not have. They might proscribe a painkiller, but otherwise she would sit around for a couple of days with a headache and be OK. If she didn't go to the hospital, there was a 99% chance that she would sit around and take advil and be OK. But there was that 1% lingering chance that it was worse than we thought and that not going was a horrible decision. We opted not to go to the hospital. It sucked worrying for days. Luckily she was ok in the end. But now that we have the means, my policy is that no matter what the cost, any recommended/optional healthcare gets paid for.

In 1952 Aneurin Bevan, arguably the architect of the UK NHS, wrote a book about his beliefs - interestingly enough he called it In Place of Fear which pretty much sums up what the NHS achieved:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

In the USA health insurance terminology "out-of-pocket" refers to what you have to pay for some procedure in addition to what you normally pay for insurance coverage. With the insurance I had when I was in the USA a visit to the GP would be 30$ out of pocket, on top of the monthly insurance fee (that was 300$, I think).

I'm in the US. A few months ago I stood up into an open cabinet door and required twelve staples in my head. The (non-hospital) emergency medical facility charged me my $100 deductible and billed the remainder to my insurance. About three months later I got a letter apologizing for over billing, and a check for $50.

I don't expect thousands of dollars in bills in the future.

"The rates that insurance companies pay are negotiated based on what they believe a hospital’s true costs are. But then those rates are jacked up an average of 30% to 50% to make up for money that hospitals lose in treating patients who don’t have private insurance — which is the majority of them. So to make up the difference, they overcharge patients who are insured. This practice is called cost-shifting."

I think this article makes a pretty good argument for Universal Healthcare

The best argument for private healthcare is that it creates competition which drives prices down. If you are being charged random amounts of money for the same stuff based on seemingly arbitrary factors then that would suggest this is not happening as it should.

The current healthcare model doesn't promote competition. Providers must inflate prices to cover costs, since they know they will be reimbursed by insurance based on the insurers pricing model, not their own.

Private healthcare would have to start providing actual costs to insurers, and insurers would have to accept that those costs include losses from people without insurance for competition to take effect.

There are many objections to universal healthcare, but not healthcare reform (Healthcare Reform != Universal Healthcare). The government has broken healthcare in the US through all sorts scams and tax incentives (why is employment tied to healthcare, wage controls in the 1940s), the solution is not to give the government more control. We can already see this with the medicare "doctor fix" and other broken government programs that actually encourage spending.

A better solution would be to allow nonprofits to hold large amounts of money, i.e. save during the good times, and to allow them to operate across state lines.

I'd like to, but unfortunately I live in the US and my government doesn't allow legislators to propose universal healthcare systems: the rules state that single payer systems may not be discussed, much less voted on.

I don't care if it's communist, socialist, fascist, or all three at once. It's awesome. I'd gladly pay more if I had to if only to avoid all the paperwork related to private insurance.

I love how this comment is getting up and downvoted all over the place, it has been as low as -1 and as high as 13. Currently on 9