Just been dealing with the pharmacy and our health insurance

[xiphias]

Can anyone give me an example of ANY problem that we'd have with socialized medicine that we don't have right now with our current health care system?

I mean, if I'm going to have to go through byzantine, bizzare, arbitrary bureaucracy and have to bang my head against walls and argue with people to have simple, commonsense health care taken care of, I'd like to at least know that it was available to everyone.

Comments

[holzman.livejournal.com]

This is the observation of people who come from countries with socialized health care; care becomes universally crappy.

It's not the observation of people who've told me about the socialized health care they recieve. Nor has "crappy doctors who follow the letter of the law" been notably absent from the tale fodder from people who've told me about their health care in the U.S. unless they've had serious dollars to drop -- and sometimes even then.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It was the observation of a friend of mine living in Russia in the 80s, and another who lived in the UK in the 90s. I didn't mean to imply it was the observation of *everyone* in that situation; YMMV.

Their point, jointly, was that yes, even *with* money, you couldn't really buy local health care -- there was no incentive to perform functions that weren't authorized by the government, and those wheels turned slowly. So you went abroad (i.e. to the US) for new or unusual conditions.