Risk and Outcomes in Health

If you spend more on healthcare, you do tend to get better quality outcomes. There isn't always a linear relationship, and the purchaser does matter. If the purchaser is unrelated to the consumer (translated, that's government and patient in a national health service) there is a risk of a disconnect. This is illustrated to a point with this great chart from a recent survey of European health systems. This seems to underline the idea that if you want more money spent on health, raising at least some of that through insurance makes sense - rather than having the state guess how much health cover you would like, through a kind of lowest common denominator national lottery. Link.

Comments

[Markim]

A bit of irony to add, I daresay, is in overlooking that much of the "cost" of socialized medicine is not in the money we pay but in the liberties we forfeit: once the government is paying to keep us alive, from a financial standpoint, it had better assume great power to dictate every particular of our lifestyle.

[m]

"much of the 'cost' of socialized medicine is not in the money we pay"

I agree that we do forfeit a significant amount of liberties with nationalized health care. But the idea that it costs less in dollar terms is fiction, for the reason mentioned in the original post.

When patients don't have skin in the game, they tend to spend money quite freely. Patients with high-deductible ($2,500 or so) plans tend to be much more conscientous consumers of health care, with no noticible decline in outcomes.

In fact, nationalized health care creates a double disconnect (if that makes sense) between the patient and the cost of their care. Private health insurance with a low deductible is a single disconnect because the insurance comes between me and the bill. In nationalized health care, not only do I not see the bill, I don't see the payment because it's automatically deducted from my paycheck. We would be completely shielded from the cost of our care and the only check on our behavior would be lines we'd be forced to wait in to get care.

[m]

"much of the 'cost' of socialized medicine is not in the money we pay"

I agree that we do forfeit a significant amount of liberties with nationalized health care. But the idea that it costs less in dollar terms is fiction, for the reason mentioned in the original post.

When patients don't have skin in the game, they tend to spend money quite freely. Patients with high-deductible ($2,500 or so) plans tend to be much more conscientous consumers of health care, with no noticible decline in outcomes.

In fact, nationalized health care creates a double disconnect (if that makes sense) between the patient and the cost of their care. Private health insurance with a low deductible is a single disconnect because the insurance comes between me and the bill. In nationalized health care, not only do I not see the bill, I don't see the payment because it's automatically deducted from my paycheck. We would be completely shielded from the cost of our care and the only check on our behavior would be lines we'd be forced to wait in to get care.

[JadeDragon@innovativepassiveincome]

I agree with the comments about a double disconnect in healthcare. There should be user fees that act like a co-pay. That way we are Insured against catastrophic problems but we have incentive to solve/prevent smaller issues.