It's bad enough that people have to purchase private health insurance out of their own pockets, because that means a problem for poor people. However, there are county hospitals and the like, so to a limited extent, America has socialized medicine, I've been told.
But what I find is worse is the half-hearted efforts that have been made to get the benefits of socialism from capitalism. Someone decided it was unfair that HIV-positive people couldn't afford health insurance. So they passed a law forbidding health insurers to discriminate, based on this actual risk factor.
The trouble is, though, you don't have to buy health insurance from insurance company X the way you have to pay your taxes. So a private insurer simply cannot get into the redistribution business.
Result? The only health insurance there is are large averaged-out institutional employment plans. (The government came up with COBRA to let people keep their large-corporation coverage after they leave work, attempting to fix the problem their regulations created with more regulation.)
Self-employed artists and musicians, though, just can't get health insurance. Period.
People desperately want to stay alive, and keep their loved ones alive. Not ensuring that money is simply out of the equation when it comes to health care will lead to normal, honest people being driven to the breaking point and committing crimes. It's a headache that isn't needed.
At the same time, though, it is in another way a good thing that at least one country doesn't have socialized medicine - doctors can point to it to show what a doctor is worth. With the pressure that already exists in Canada to cut what doctors can bill to Medicare, once the U.S. adopts socialized medicine, it may not be long before doctors in the whole developed world get paid about as much as schoolteachers.
