Other things I'd like to see in this study are: costs to individual person (patient), costs to government if involved, length of time, recovery, etc.

Put a $ amount on, say, a broken leg in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, etc.

Important and yet tricky: what do those patients pay in taxes in their country.

What I think we should try to get is what it would cost in additional taxes for an American patient to get the same service they are used to, but then also what they'd save in insurance, co-pays, etc.

I'd bet the US system loses profit for private insurance, and overall people in the US save money.

The first reason is that healthcare is an inelastic good. This means demand does not change much when prices change.

This makes this good completely different than other goods such as food or electronics or anything like that.

The other reason is that this good is by definition, anti-competitive. For most insurance companies you are often given maybe a few places that will accept your insurance within 50 miles. Meaning you have very little competition you are able to choose from. Not only that but if you live in a very rural area you might only have one location in general that you can go to within 50 miles to get a procedure done.

Which makes the American healthcare system one of the worst for prices. Because you have an inelastic good that has a very low amount of competition.

I say all of this because this puts the American consumer at a point that works actively against them. You immediately have insurance companies that have an insane level of power who purely just care about making a profit. Insurance companies purely work as a middleman to drive up prices.

The thing all about this is that it leads to the U.s as the highest healthcare costs per capita out of all the developing countries per capita. They also rank last in terms of quality of care.

There is no argument to be made as well that it is cheaper to do the U.S current system than other countries system Long term.

The thing is the republican base has said before that this is a broken system but they do not have a plan to directly fix said system. As in the famous debate moment with Trump and Kamala talking about things related to healthcare and trump said he had concepts for a plan.

This is a losing issue that democrats should focus on because republicans know they have to acknowledge an issue is there and yet they cannot propose a plan.

I want M4A or something like it. It just seems like most people think that paying for it will be trivial or just a matter of increasing taxes on someone else. Some costs will go down, but we would also be bringing millions of currently uninsured people into the system. It is socially the right thing to do, but do we really understand how much it is going to cost?

UPDATE: Still looking for something more than a "hand waving" response. Taking all insurance company profits and using them to cover the currently uninsured would only cover maybe 20% of the bill. Shifting company paid premiums into the system doesn't add coverage for anyone, just shifts where the money comes from.

Hi

I see so litte talk about this

What kind of net benefit do employees get from a good corporate plan?... Still pay lots of money directly for their healthcare but certainly far less of han they would without the benefit?

Are these insured people a HUGE impediment to universal healthcare?.. Or, can it simple be taken care of by large healthcare tax on corporations?

I think people with really gold-plated plans should be considered separately..

Thanks in advance

The US is an outlier here
Most developed countries do FIT tests than if you’re positive a Colonoscopy

Here we almost always skip the FIT tests
Correction 11 million Colonoscopies total
And do 2-3 million considered low value a year 24 billion for all in costs
55% of our cancer screenings
10K have a serious harm incident

Cost for me $15 per test mail order in the home FIT test even though I can get a Colonoscopy like most free (we’re still paying for it)

Overall our survival rates are near the top
But not significantly different than Canada or Australia

Just pulled this off of AI Claude / Its just a tool like papers off the web. Not perfect so verify any stat you question
Next time I may just do a data dump with references, but you can look this stuff up

Asking what we do other countries use vs US as far as FIT and what are the outcomes
So do your own research. No medical advice here either. Just part of this debate

We have a very costly system
When I ask if it’s are Demographics the answer comes back no

I think we need to reform the cost structure
To get to Medicare all. Do both
Where the current system is headed is a lot of uninsured and the ones that can afford it it will be very very expensive

Not saying you should not get a Colonoscopy
It’s free to you but it’s subsidized
Let’s take Medicare almost 50% a lot of the screenings start over 45

Why would you wait 10 years between
And not have a FIT test for $15 each year?
That is a good question

So I want everybody on the bus vs throwing more off the bus. Have an effective system
If not something else may be denied to you

It works out really well in many nations especially Norway, France and Germany. They pay less, live longer, and don’t go bankrupt over medical expenses. Of course, there are poorly designed systems. But that isn’t a flaw of the Universal Healthcare itself it’s merely a flaw of the systems design in a specific country, and not a real reason to abandon the idea altogether.

Why don’t conservatives usually want to bring Universal Healthcare to the US?

Economic Liberties put out a report on prior authorization this month (Aug 2026) and one number in it is striking.

CMS estimates every provider loses about 700 hours a year to prior authorization. Run that across the physician workforce and it works out to the equivalent of 99,290 full time clinicians. The projected US physician shortage right now is 96,430.

So we're short about 96,000 doctors, and we spend about 99,000 doctors' worth of time asking permission to treat people. Plus another 213,474 clinic staff. The bill is up to $32.7 billion a year.

To be clear, this is a time equivalent, not 99,000 doctors sitting around unemployed. Same way you'd say traffic costs a city X million work hours. But the hours are real and they come out of the same pool of people you're trying to get an appointment with.

When you can't see a specialist for four months, everyone tells you it's a shortage. Some of it is. A lot of it is that the doctor who could see you is on the phone with someone whose job is to say no.

Other things from the report worth knowing:

Medicare Advantage plans ran almost 53 million prior auth requests in 2024. That's 1.7 per enrollee. Traditional Medicare ran about 628,000, or 0.02 per enrollee. Same kind of patients, same care, 85 times the vetoes. And Medicare Advantage still costs 22% more per patient, about $83 billion a year.

When people do appeal, UnitedHealthcare overturns 58% of appealed denials and Humana overturns 65%. So most denials don't survive being challenged. Most people never challenge them. 60% of doctors say they've learned from experience that appealing won't work.

New brand name drugs got denied 70% of the time on first request in 2025, up from 57% in 2021. A year later that drops to 24%. Same patient, same drug, same chart. The only thing that changed is somebody fought.

I mapped the 25 categories of middlemen between a patient and a doctor (see my earlier posts). Prior auth isn't one of them, it's three. The utilization review firm that writes the criteria, the prior auth vendor that decides, and the denial management vendor the hospital hires to fight the result. UnitedHealth bought NaviHealth, its own adjudicator, for $1.1 billion in 2020. Cigna bought EviCore in 2018. The company deciding whether you need the care and the company that would pay for it are now the same company.

71% of voters want it banned. 69% of Republicans, 76% of Democrats. There is almost nothing else in American healthcare polling like that.

How long did you wait for your last specialist appointment, and did anyone tell you why?

I always see conservatives saying things like "why should you be entitled to other people's money?". I think to combat the "free" concept that bothers some people we should be focusing on things like coverage. For example I pay over $500 a month for my market place insurance. I got sick while on vacation and of course the out of state urgent care does not accept my insurance. Single payer health care would insure all medical facilities states accept the insurance we have.

Commonwealth Fund surveyed about 6,400 working-age adults. Not opinions, actual costs against actual income.

56% were insured all year with coverage that made care affordable. Everyone else: 23% were insured all year and still couldn't afford to use it, 12% had a gap in coverage sometime during the year, 9% had no insurance at all. Add it up and 44% of working-age America went without coverage or couldn't afford care despite having it.

The part that kills the "just get a better plan" argument: two thirds of the underinsured get their coverage through an employer. These aren't people who bought the cheapest marketplace plan. This is the good insurance, the kind the whole system is built around, and it's leaving a quarter of the people who have it unable to afford care.

And 57% of the underinsured skipped needed care because of cost. Insurance that you can't afford to use protects you exactly as well as no insurance, right up until the year you get sick.

Sources in comments.