Topic: do you think Healthcare and College should be free for all in the US? If so, how - page 2. (Read 328 times)

Health and education goes hand in hand for a developed nation. I'm not a us citizen but i believe certain things should be accessible for everybody no matter the financial situation as long there are rules to follow, like periodic free health controls, dedicated seminars of volunteer activities in the educational field, developed for the pore people (only with education we can escape from poverty.) But unfortunately at the end of the day all what matters is the numbers.

Agree with everything you say, apart from this line. The issue isn't these companies, it's how the US deals with them. Every other developed nation in the world has to deal with pharmaceutical companies and equipment manufacturers, and manages to do so at a fraction of the cost the US pays. The majority of major pharmaceutical companies are headquartered in nations with socialized healthcare, and their socialized healthcare markets far outweigh their US markets.

People don't realize how much of a good thing that is, or how ridiculous the US market is. Recently there was widespread praise for Illinois governor JB Pritzker for signing a law which caps the cost of insulin at $100 per month. Elsewhere in the US, individuals pay anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per month for insulin. The cost to produce a month's supply of insulin is about $4. The UK's NHS buys insulin for less than $10, and the companies still make a healthy profit on it. $1,000 a month is utterly obscene.

NO

Free Video
Milton Friedman - The Free Lunch Myth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmqoCHR14n8




There's No Such Thing As a Free Lunch: Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the Paul Snowden Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. He has written a number of books, including two with his wife, Rose D. Friedman---the bestselling Free to Choose and Two Lucky People: Memoirs, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

https://www.amazon.com/Theres-Such-Thing-Free-Lunch/dp/087548297X

If no alternative solution is found to make its services free then you can forget about it.
But it is necessarily a question that must be asked, and if you have things to offer this is the time to talk about it.
As said before, there are so many resources ridiculously wasted ...

In the US, there's definitely a lot of wasted resources but as far as healthcare and college being free?  Nope, there's no way in hell that's going to happen without jacking up taxes and/or cutting spending on a lot of things.

There are a lot of things that could potentially be defunded, but everyone who works in those sectors always fights tooth and nail to keep their jobs and relevance, so it isn't easy for politicians to push for that--nor is it easy for them to increase taxes without people protesting (and rightly so IMO). 

I think healthcare should be cheaper, if not free, and I think that's possible.  But college?  Why shouldn't people have to pay for their own secondary education?  That's a lot less critical than healthcare IMO, and I would point out that there are lots of financial aid packages available for students who want to go to college.  Part of the problem is that many students major in subjects that won't make them competitive in the job market after graduation, and thus they're saddled with enormous debt that they have trouble paying.  That's a lousy situation, but I bet many of them could have done better at a state school where tuition is reduced for state residents.  It's still expensive, but it's not outrageous.  Not all colleges cost the same, if you didn't know it.

@Hydrogen, you light be right there.

There's a limit to how much people can pay for prescription drugs here which is generally a good thing imo as it means pharmaceuticals have to lower the cost of the medicine or provide an less effective but still productive product (charities seem to help if it's a life threatening condition afaik) .

It should, because many teenagers or people in the US that can't study due to a financial problem. They are missing their opportunity to learn in school and it is hard for a person to become illiterate and ignorant. That's why government should allow all the college school or university to become a tuition-free in US, not only in US, it is applicable to any part of the world. We need to prioritize the quality of the education in a country so that people will help to build a better world for us.

In terms of Healthcare, it also should be free because it is not a choice for the people to get sick. The problem nowadays is that when you don't have money to go to a hospital, you have nothing to do but to suffer. Government should do something about that, most especially those senior citizens that requires to have a medical assistance as they grow older and older.

The only way either could be free is through the extension of volunteer programs like doctors without borders or volunteer teaching/tutoring.

It is possible. But governments, CEOs and politicians would strongly oppose it.


#1  Europe pays a higher income tax in contrast to the united states. Summing all taxes together to calculate real tax rates, americans pay collectively higher taxes.

#2  The cost of health insurance has increased approximately 20% annually over the span of the last 10+ years. That large compounding interest has always been the real issue afaik. Neither politicians nor the media has ever recommended options for fixing healthcare that would end in anything other than widespread and catastrophic disaster.


Private health insurance profit margins only range around 5%. Which is perfectly normal for the insurance industry. Health insurance has never been anything aside from a scapegoat and deflection from the real issues.

The real problem with US healthcare has always been big pharma, medical equipment manufacturers and the healthcare industry in general boasting profit margins in the 20% to 40% range.

There are many other mitigating factors like the doctor to patient ratio looming around 1:1000 wheras in foreign countries its closer to a healthier statistic like 1:300. The media never mentions any of the real problems with healthcare as if their goal were to ensure the public remain ignorant.

Middlemen and profits, mostly. The health insurance industry is massive. There are a huge number of people employed by this, from the call center staff to the people in the hospitals sitting down with physicians, pharmacists, nursing staff, etc. and going through every single patient's treatment, drugs, operations, scans, tests, care, etc. making sure it all gets billed correctly. Its a huge amount of unnecessary staff, and it takes up a huge amount of healthcare workers' time. The amount of paperwork it generates is massive, and obviously more staff to deal with all this. These companies obviously have to make profits as well and boy, do they make profits!

Varies massively. The average is around $400-500 per month per person, but that doesn't give you anywhere near full coverage. Plenty of plans include various diseases or treatments they won't cover, if you go "out of network" and use healthcare services or providers your insurance company doesn't approve of they won't cover you, and so on. The plans all still include deductibles, which is how much you have to pay before your insurance will even kick in (usually several thousands of dollars), and copays or coinsurances, which is how much you have to pay even after your insurance has kicked in. All this is on top of the fact that a higher proportion of US tax revenue is spent on healthcare than most other developed nations, even ones with fully socialized medicine.

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Here's part of a post I made a while back about US healthcare:


US spends more of its tax dollars on healthcare than any other developed nation, and people also have to pay astronomical insurance prices, and people still have to pay out of pocket, and people still go bankrupt from a single serious illness or accident, and for all this money, US citizens still get inferior care to every other developed nation on the planet. There is only one good reason why the US can't move to socialized healthcare, and it is because the insurance companies use their insane profits to lobby politicians and use the media to push the lie that socialized medicine is somehow evil. It's not a case of "needing to find the money for it", as OP suggests. It would be a massive cost saving.

I have a few questions on this topic, not sure if this is thread hijacking or not:

1. As someone from the UK we have free healthcare at the point of use, apparently we pay less tax than the US so I'm always curious what this money actually gets spent on?
2. How much is health insurance over there? I know private health insurance in Europe ranges from $200-$300 for a normal healthy person and on average the NHS in the UK is funded at a rate of £197 per person per month.

do you think Healthcare and College should be free for all in the US? If so, how do you recommend they find it?