From a Member at DU
That's right. I can tell you from personal experience.
I lived in Japan from 1995 to 2000. I had the Social National Health Insurance.
I paid $70 a month in premiums, which was matched by my employer.
It covered full medical AND dental for me, my wife and two kids.
I could choose any doctor I liked, so we picked the doctor in the neighborhood.
I could go any time, even without an appointment, and still the wait times were less than 30 minutes most of the time.
Office visits were $5.
Prescription drugs were $5.
There was no HMO or other gouging middleman to deal with, and little paperwork involved in being referred to a specialist.
I understand that Japan spends less than HALF per capita of what we do on health care, despite its aging population, and still they manage to cover EVERYONE, while we only cover about 60% of the population.
*Yeah, National Health Care in Japan, and in European countries with similar systems is a dismal failure.
After all, it totally fails to generate huge profits for overpaid CEOs, shell-gaming HMO's and redundant "Health Care Access Administrators".
We'd best never emulate those commie systems. After all, who wants to live in a country where everybody's healthy?
Just wait till one of your lower-paid co-workers comes down with say, kidney disease, and then you and everyone in the office can just have bake sales and car washes to pay for his care. That's the way to do it!
Or if you're really lucky, he just won't mention it for shame of being unable to afford health care, and he'll just die quietly and save you all the trouble,
Oh, thank you George Bush for your wonderful health savings plans. I can't wait until you take away the employer deduction for health care and rid us of those pesky benefits once and for all.
After all, it's not like we can already put money in a tax-deferred account right now, is it?
And EVERYONE has a couple hundred EXTRA bucks lying around at the end of every month to sock away, right?
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