BuT bUt BuT tHe TaXeS!!

... I can almost guarantee the taxes are still less than the lost direct compensation from employers that instead goes to your insurance "benefit." :/

American here.

We were taught in grade school that Europeans lived longer because of the Mediterranean diet they ate. They could eat good bread and drink red wine and out live us Americans.

Turns out it was universal healthcare. We'll never get it here, and we'll die earlier and poorer because of it.

I live in the Netherlands. If I visit the hospital I have to pay my yearly deductible of €350 first. This person paid zero dollars because her travel insurance paid for it.

The Netherlands has the same system as Obamacare. Privatized insurance with government subsidies for low income. Only difference is that the government sorta acts like a single payer, they negotiate with big pharma over medicine prices and the government with the insurers make a price list for healthcare providers on what they can charge.

Of course a healthcare provider can decide to charge whatever they want but then insurance won’t cover that business.

I naively expected that all of Europe had health care figured out. The bullshit $450 USD bill I got in Sweden for existing in the same room with a doctor for 15 minutes taught me otherwise.

My daughter was in Ireland and had a problem that would have cost her a minimum of four thousand in the US with insurance. Her cost was 75 euros. They apologized for it not being complexly free.

yeah, but that's socialism. I'd rather have socialism with a middleman and pay 30 times more!

Did you guys think we were just all collectively lying to you about this shit?

Hey, Grammy's cancer bill just came in and it's 1 million euros, tell the Americans it was free though.

I'm financially destroyed but at least I can make fun of Americans

Insurance is just a scam to keep people enslaved to jobs for their premiums and coverage. If only quality care wasn't tied to employers' insurance we might actually have competition back in the market. Have better products and a livable state of life. As someone on Medicare I can't afford a 400% increase to my premium after tax credits are slashed in the coming years. Socialism is at least a band aid to our monolithic oppressive capitalist economy.

Yep

And they've been lied to not only about healthcare

They've also been lied to about work)life balance, about taxes for the rich, about cars and bicycles, about...

The US has become w cesspool over the past 5 decades basically because everyone there has been lying their asses off and nobody cared to force people to be truthful about anything

A good press could have stopped this tide but that's gone since long ago too

This is misleading. Also in Europe people need to pay for healthcare - it’s just that the costs are lower and more equally distributed. It does happen that a foreigner is treated for free (should the hospital decided that billing is too much hassle, but that happens verrry rarely).

I have a friend who is a doctor and technically speaking Americans should get charged for medical treatment and then their insurance should pay for it, after all they are not citizens and don't pay taxes. But no one seems all that clear on how to actually bill them so it almost always never happens.

The American system is so batshit crazy that no one else from any other country knows how to interface with it.

Won't somebody please think of the shareholders!?

I mean if fascism isn't enough of an incentive to leave a shitty country i don't know what is.

You are not getting healthcare before you do your homework (a revolution deposing your oligarchs).

And all of that collective real cost to administer is a tiny fraction of what an American would pay not only out of pocket, but also the monthly premiums both they and their employer pay to the insurance company. Who will initially deny the claim just as a matter of policy, regardless of whether it's covered or submitted correctly.

Then they will deny again because the ID code they used to bill it isn't "right" or it supposedly falls into some bullshit loophole documented nowhere. So both the patient and doctor's staff have to spend dozens of hours collectively wasting their time fighting to get something simple actually handled like it should be.

For a nation with half of all citizens owning guns, it’s amazing that there isn’t more pressure on politicians to implement a universal healthcare scheme.

Lone wolves tend to target schools and workplaces.

It will always remain baffling to me that no rogue widows or widowers, by consequence of the system, don’t bring their grievances to those in charge of healthcare policy.

I'm sure Trump would say that it was because the USA subsidized all your services because Americans created healthcare and everyone else is stealing it.

Sounds like COMMUNISM to me!

As an American, I'll gladly support the world's greatest economy by paying a few thousand to get checked out. Know why all these European countries are so poor? Because their health insurance and private health care companies barely make anything.

Do your part! Contribute to the economy!

God bless America!

Americans don't have health care. We have health insurance. Think about your car insurance vs a warranty. That's the difference. We have a system in place that we want to be something it was never designed to be.

Americans are so afraid of communism that they forgot the good things that it can bring. Capitalism on the other hand...

I mean as cool as this is, it's exactly the story the right uses to oppose it.

Non tax paying, non citizens getting subsidized healthcare. A conservative horror story for the ages