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.

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Similar to Israel

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

Here it is actually three-tiered in a sense. All of the "HMO" here MUST supply a basic "basket" of health-services, including thousands of common prescription-medicine for real-cheap (~3$ a prescription). The cost of insurance is salary-dependent in the form of a health-tax (stepped percentages, highest being 5% with a max-cap), so everybody has coverage. Additionally the HMO compete with each other offering additional services as part of the basic package, or additional coverage-plans. Beyond that you have private medicine, in which you can pay full price for whatever you want.

Most of the hospitals (first tier) are government run, and paid for their services by the HMO, which supply the common day to day services themselves (second tier), and finally the third, entirely private tier. So while our hospitals are somewhat over-crowded (and this is mostly infrastructure falling behind growth rates), we have one of the best health-systems in the world.