this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
266 points (99.3% liked)
Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related
2398 readers
68 users here now
Health: physical and mental, individual and public.
Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.
See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.
Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.
Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.
Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.
Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem is tax law! The money my company pays for my health insurance is not taxed. If instead of giving me their insurance they give me that $1000/month what I get (after taxes) is around $700/month.
As such private insurance as learned to serve their customer: the company I work for. Since I'm not the customer they do not serve me. There is plenty of competition in private insurance, but I don't get too look for it, I'm limited to whatever my company gives me as options, which works out to two different plans from the same company with tiny differences.
Returning to this. Tax law by itself is least problem. Recent example is Canada, where they zeroed taxes for month, and prices got increased as result. Private companies will charge as much as people are willing to pay.
I will expand my other reply and tell how and why UHC will make even private healthcare better. Right now in USSA alternative to private healthcare is dying. While in developed countries alternative to private healthcare is healthcare. When even worst national insurance(other kind of single-player system) provides functioning healthcare, asking 1k for spit-and-pray healthcare is not a viable buisness model. If you really want competetion for patients, then UHC is it. Without it yoir healthcare is race to the bottom - minimum healthcare for maximum price.
Is it not subtracted from taxes? In Europe paying for healthcare generally counts as pre-tax expence, so you pay taxes as if you did not receive money that you paid for healthcare. Basically less direct private healthcare subsidy.
Yep. That's also why having UHC is better.
US tax law around health care is bad. That is my point.
UHC the customer is the government, not you. Well indirectly you since you own the government, but you then have to figure out if you vote for the person who wants UHC like you or the one who [something else unrelated to health care].
True, goverment does not exist in a vacuum. Even Putin's authoritarianism can't ignore dissatisfaction. And goverment is not just owned by people, it IS people.
I'm thinking how to reply for 15 minutes, and still have no idea. Almost all people who want to be elected are either in support of UHC(left, most nationalists), want to be seen as supporting(right, Putin's oligarchs) or would not care, but opposing UHC would contradict their ideology(pirates). And opposing single-payer models in general... It's a suicude.
You appear to be somewhere in the EU from you comment. So what if you want to make a small change to UHC?