The issue with allowing that is that you get a two tiered healthcare system where people with money get to jump the queue and people without need to wait even longer.
As a longer term consequence, this leads to a larger and larger part of the population not seeing the need to invest more public money in the healthcare system, because they don’t use it anyway. They go private whenever they have a problem
So in the long term allowing people to pay money to skip the queue could lead to the slow death spiral of your public healthcare system.
On the other hand, people say that private healthcare is more efficient than a centrally governed public one. Don’t know if that’s actually true or not, but that’s the argument used in these kinds of debates.
Obviously, US is a total exception, and that argument clearly doesn’t apply. Just look at those absurd prices and tell me how that’s efficient. In a European context though, people routinely claim that public healthcare is somehow inefficient, low quality etc. Regardless, IMO public healthcare is still great because it’s available to everyone. Although, in recent years I’ve heard quite a few stories of pretty brutal prioritization. If your head isn’t about to fall off, you’ll be at the back of the queue for a long time. Actually, there are also situations where people fall outside a specific cutoff and they aren’t sick enough to receive any treatment in the public sector. Well, I guess that’s resource optimization, but it is very sad as well.
If you don’t have the capacities, you need to prioritise
But there is also the thing, that people go to ER, where they instead should just have seen their doctor, because it’s not an acute life threatening thing
So ERs are getting overwhelmed, but they are expensive to operate
At least that’s what I got from people working at hospitals and then only from some parts of Europe
Could obviously dramatically differ, what the actual problems in different countries - or often even between different hospitals - are
The issue with allowing that is that you get a two tiered healthcare system where people with money get to jump the queue and people without need to wait even longer.
As a longer term consequence, this leads to a larger and larger part of the population not seeing the need to invest more public money in the healthcare system, because they don’t use it anyway. They go private whenever they have a problem
So in the long term allowing people to pay money to skip the queue could lead to the slow death spiral of your public healthcare system.
On the other hand, people say that private healthcare is more efficient than a centrally governed public one. Don’t know if that’s actually true or not, but that’s the argument used in these kinds of debates.
Obviously, US is a total exception, and that argument clearly doesn’t apply. Just look at those absurd prices and tell me how that’s efficient. In a European context though, people routinely claim that public healthcare is somehow inefficient, low quality etc. Regardless, IMO public healthcare is still great because it’s available to everyone. Although, in recent years I’ve heard quite a few stories of pretty brutal prioritization. If your head isn’t about to fall off, you’ll be at the back of the queue for a long time. Actually, there are also situations where people fall outside a specific cutoff and they aren’t sick enough to receive any treatment in the public sector. Well, I guess that’s resource optimization, but it is very sad as well.
Obviously the US system is most efficient, as there are no wait times for healthcare when no one can afford to get healthcare
I think Antarctica is the best. No people, no healthcare, no wait time.
Those are all problems of funding imho
If you don’t have the capacities, you need to prioritise
But there is also the thing, that people go to ER, where they instead should just have seen their doctor, because it’s not an acute life threatening thing
So ERs are getting overwhelmed, but they are expensive to operate
At least that’s what I got from people working at hospitals and then only from some parts of Europe
Could obviously dramatically differ, what the actual problems in different countries - or often even between different hospitals - are