• dan@upvote.au
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    10 months ago

    That’s why it’s cheaper though, and why you also don’t go broke if you’re poor and have health issues.

    Per capita, American spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, and that’s including all the people that leave things untreated because they can’t afford treatment. It’s not more expensive because the care is necessarily better than other countries; it’s more expensive mostly because of a lot of overheads in the US system. Paying for basic health care as part of taxes usually also means that it’s a single-payer system, meaning the government negotiates pricing for the entire country, rather than having lots of insurance companies that each do that separately (usually including a healthy profit margin for themselves). That’s one reason why medicines are so much cheaper in other countries.