I don’t imagine the perfect system anymore than I expect you do. I imagine a better one, where being unemployed doesn’t mean you’re automatically uninsured and families don’t rely on the emergency room as their primary means of medical care because there have no coverage for preventive medicine.

Yes, there are places where everyone receives medical help paid by everyone’s taxes. And yes, I think it’s the better way. But in places like this, many treatments are deemed ‘non worth it’ (I am sure an euphemism exists) Surprisingly enough, these are usually the same places where the ‘big bad state’ ‘terminates’ heavily damaged newborns, and ‘initiates force’ when people do not agree with the treatments that the ‘experts’ decree.

As you’ve said, no system is perfect, but I’ve yet to hear that Canada, for example, is a major transgressor in terminating newborns. I don’t think it correlates with universal healthcare.

Explain to poor dumb me, what premium do you expect people to pay when, with the existing technology, a cancer patient can cost up to 100k per month, an elderly person’s life can be extended a few years at the cost of 1/2M per year, etc, etc, etc…

It will never work. For a system to work there must come a time when the patient is left on his own resources - personal assets, charity, friends and family, 10 grams of lead, etc… This is especially true for elderly people. Come on! With 50,000 dollars per month, you can anihilate the malnutrition problems of a hundred kids from poor families, or keep a person with failed lungs, liver and kidneys hooked up to a machine. I know which way I would go.

Yes, there are places where everyone receives medical help paid by everyone’s taxes. And yes, I think it’s the better way. But in places like this, many treatments are deemed ‘non worth it’ (I am sure an euphemism exists) Surprisingly enough, these are usually the same places where the ‘big bad state’ ‘terminates’ heavily damaged newborns, and ‘initiates force’ when people do not agree with the treatments that the ‘experts’ decree. On average, it works out better than what we have in the US, but some people (healthy, rich, or well insured) benefit more from our system.

Neither system will help you if you are one of the those that require extremely advanced and expensive attention and cannot pay for it themselves. If you believe in something, pray you never become one. If like me, you don’t believe in anything much, the best you can do is try to improve the average wealth of society. And no, becoming rich is not a better bet. I know two familes that went broke over half a dozen of years because a kid developed an expensive, non-terminal condition. They both started with a few millions of assets. They both did not recover until the sistuation changed - one kid took his life, the other moved away from her family and miraculously stabilized. I also know a business owner who, after semi-successful cancer treatment, refused further help because he was afraid that he would destroy his estate.

In any case, it’s an unfair world. It sucks to be me, but it serves me right for getting born poor outside of the US. ;-)

If that bullshit with the trucking company ever happens again, immediately send your father down to see the State Attorney General—send him with some paperwork (to prove your case), and a picture of you on the vent. One phone call from the State Attorney General office suggesting that they better cough up that money and send it to the proper location or be charged with several counts of felony fraud will probably get some results.

Anyone who could get hit by a bus tomorrow and need a ventilator would face all of this. Or anyone who has a tumor. Or is a soldier in the war. Because the system is broken, we’re all just that close to losing any hope of economic independence. Or life outside of an institution. Astronomical. Impossible. Ruinous. And a lurking threat.

This can’t be said enough. Anyone who right now thinks they’ve done all the “right things” by having an education, being gainfully employed, saving money, and having insurance, and thus thinks that therefore they are protected and immune from the financial disaster of bad health or accidents (or the bad health or accident of a family member) is delusional. And the problem with relying on employment-based insurance is that once you lose your job, you then have no insurance. COBRA payments at $1000 per month aren’t affordable through any state unemployment check.