You ask some great questions! So I’ll answer them before I voice my opinion. Although it will probably become quite obvious as I go along!
Beware: I’m rather left wing with some socialist ideas, so my thoughts on this matter are influenced by that. Although I’ll try to be as factual and logical as possible!
Healthcare isn’t really free free in the UK. Or anywhere, for that matter. So the quality improves based on how much the government is willing to invest in it. That’s why there are so many strikes in the NHS at the moment! We have a conservative government that keep cutting the funding. When they cut the funding, hospitals have to cut staff to compensate. So there are more people per doctor. Fewer cleaners. Fewer nurses, etc. That raises waiting times and lowers standards.
The good thing about a free healthcare system is that patients aren’t treated like profit. There was a study recently that showed that doctors are far more likely to prescribe medicine and treatments that are unnecessary when they’re directly making money from those treatments. It’s a pretty obvious outcome, if you ask me. That’s human nature!
So in a lot of ways, having the doctors earn a fixed, meritocratic amount lowers the risk of overprescription, which improves quality. Doctors surgeries don’t spend time and money giving out invoices and trying to sell people treatments. Plus, since the government is funding the health services, the service providers have to make sure they meet government standards otherwise they’ll get their fundings cut and their fundings will be given to a higher performing hospital or practice.
In the UK, definitely! Most people don’t bother. They just use the NHS either way since it’s there and it’s good enough. However, there are two options for paying for healthcare.
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Getting “health insurance”. It’s not quite the same as it is in the US. It’s much more about going to private hospitals and paying a monthly fee to have access to those. When I was a kid before my other 500 siblings were born, my dad used to pay for BUPA for me. That’s a private healthcare system! It’s kinda supplementary to the NHS for a lot of people, to be honest. When I broke my wrist, I had BUPA, but I still went through the NHS because it’s good enough!
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Using the “private” options in the NHS. When you’re a student or a child, you can get glasses on the NHS up to £25 in cost. They’re nothing fancy! If you want designer options, you get the £25 off and then you pay for the rest yourself. When my mum gave birth to my little sister (she’s 3 now wut), she paid for a private room in UCLH so she wouldn’t have to deal with other mothers just after she gave birth. She could have got a semi-private or communal room on the NHS! And she got all of the services free. She just paid for the room like a hotel. In terms of dental care, you get normal silver fillings on the NHS. If you want the more aesthetic white fillings, you pay. If you have teeth that are so wonky they affect your speech or the way you eat or really look bad, you get braces on the NHS. If they’re just a little bit wonky, you have to pay to get them.
Would I say a lot? No. They don’t make as much as they could if they were selling their own treatments for the price they set. However, the NHS is under pressure to match the salaries of the private options so that doctors don’t up and leave. That keeps their salaries pretty high.
Doctors still earn well over the national average and minimum wage, and they get so many perks! Loads of businesses and services offer a discount for NHS services!
I already covered this, but it largely depends on how much the government spends on the healthcare. When I was a child, waiting times in the hospital were under an hour where I lived in London – and that’s for non-emergency. Of course, emergency patients get seen straight away. My nan recently had an operation on her knee. That took 3 months, but government cuts are largely to blame for that! Less doctors to do the services!
But when I was a child, I found out that I’m severely double-jointed throughout my body and it caused me flat feet and lower back problems. I got seen in 2 weeks. My aunty got diagnosed with cancer last year and she started chemo a week after she went to the hospital for her scan.
The issue is getting much bigger now thanks to the cuts, though!
My few comments on the US system:
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There are quite a few people in America who don’t go to the hospital when they should because of the price. If you can’t affort sufficient healthcare and your job doesn’t offer you health insurance, you’re kinda screwed and you can go bankrupt to pay for getting cancer! The problem is a lot bigger than people make it out to be. Even health insurance, my family in America don’t use ambulances when they have an emergency because they still have to pay 20% of the costs of their hospital bill and they want to keep the prices as low as possible.
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As well as it being positively disgusting to me that some people out there who can’t afford to be ill, there’s another big issue with this: it causes more health issues in society as a whole. If people are too scared to go to the hospital because it costs too much, then we’re allowing a lot of preventable diseases to spread. Just like the anti-vaxxers refusing to vaccinate their kids and causing a spread of disease, it affects everyone. Immunisation and treatment of the sick helps everyone else around them, too, and lowers the costs of healthcare in general. You know what they say! Prevention is better than treatment! And if we’re treating as many people with contagious diseases as possible, we’re stopping those people from spreading the diseases and causing more diease. If they’re sitting at home avoiding having to fork out money, disease can spread much easier.
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America spends more per capita on defence than the next few (I wanna say 5 but it could be more) countries put together. And a lot of these countries are also at a great risk of security threats! If America put together a little more of that money for healthcare (the government actually spends a lot on health care as it is), they could give everyone a basic amount of care.
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People like Trump who criticise free healthcare now have been recorded in the past talking about how good it is! I remember watching a video with him praising the speed and sanity of the NHS when he was in Scotland a few years ago.
I’ve never thought about this much.
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as is income tax for most people who aren’t rich. Surprisingly, goods still cost about the same!
