Wow. I'm being hammered by my Southern friends about Vermont's health care decision.

[eridani]

83. Americans mostly do NOT have excellent health care--they don't have health care at all--

--because they mostly don't get sick. In every age demographic, 5% of that demographic accounts for 50% of the costs of that demographic. and 15% accounts for 85% of the cost. The remaining 85% account for only 15% of costs. If you are not in the sick 15%, your opinion of how good your insurance is is worth exactly what your opinion about how good your fire extinguisher is--that is to say nothing whatsoever. Most people who become medically bankrupt have insurance. Medical bankruptcies in the rest of the developed world = 0.

"Ready availability" is the sickest fucking amoral sociopathic claim about US health care that I've ever heard. How is that consistent with the fact that 60,000+ people a year die in the US because they can't pay for health care? The ACA will save 24,000 a year, but applying the same actuarial standards to those who will remain uninsured yields a figure of 36,000 per year continuing to die. People who die in the rest of the developed world because of lack of money = 0.

So everything isn't covered in these countries? So what? Most of them allow you to buy what is not covered on your own dime, and since health care is so much less expensive, a majority of the population can afford that.

Example--my husband and I were biking in the Netherlands in 1996 when he developed a really serious pain in one of his teeth. The people at the hostel in Groningen where we stayed warned us that since we weren't Dutch citizens, we would have to pay cash out of pocket to a dentist. We cashed most of our remaining travelers checks, which turned out to be totally unnecessary. Charge for the first step of one root canal = 100 guilders, or about $25 American. A year later back home I needed a root canal that cost $1300. (That included the cap as well as the first drilling out step; not sure how to separate the two costs.) I got a very good root canal operation, but it was not at all different from the much cheaper Dutch one.