Forum Overview :: Theme Hospital :: It's sort of hard to know where to even get started talking about US healthcare.

[quote name="blackwater"]Do we have single-payer health care? Yes, we do-- for military veterans (the VA), and for homeless people (who simply walk into an ER-- the hospital can't turn them away.) The government spends a lot on this. Do we have death panels? Yep, we've got that, at insurance companies. But it's politically toxic, so we keep it safely isolated from the people facing re-election. Is Obamacare "free healthcare" -- um... not really. it's more like a complicated set of rules which has the effect of transferring a lot of taxpayer money to insurance companies and low-income people. Basically, health "insurance" in the US isn't really insurance; it's cost pooling. Old people are extremely expensive, but if we have enough young people in the pool, the average cost becomes affordable. So if your company employs a bunch of people and the average age is 30, the healthcare price per head isn't that bad. On the other hand, if the average age is 70, you probably can't afford it. This is the reason why people worry about an Obamacare "death spiral." Obamacare needs young and healthy people to sign up to keep the price down. Interestingly, Richard Nixon proposed something very like Obamacare, back in the 1970s, but then the whole Watergate thing happened.[/quote]