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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Why is that a good thing?

That sounds similar to indentured servitude.

EDIT: I misread the “here” as “Canada”. The US healthcare system has caused me some personal hardships, so I was surprised Canada had something similar. Luckily it’s more sensible.

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the second "here" in the Canada sentence is referring to the USA, so the poster is saying it is a bad thing.

> Why is that a good thing?

It (the US version) is not a good thing, correct.

The U.S., through employer-provided private healthcare, has not just wage slavery, but pseudo medical-slavery. If you quit your job (In the U.S.), you lose health your employer-provided health insurance and could be stuck footing the $28k bill (or at least having to negotiate / deal with it) for a sore throat.

Canada does not have such a system. Canada has taxpayer-funded healthcare. Therefore you have the liberty to quit your job and find more favourable employment without having to deal with the risk of one surprise hospitalization from bankrupting you.

GP is saying Canada did that right. The confusion arises because GP said "here" right after praising Canada, possibly misleading you to think they were referring again to Canada, which they were not.

Why is what a good thing?

I was referring to the non-transferability of health insurance in the USA; e.g. you get fired at Microsoft or anywhere with great healthcare and that is only extendable temporarily via COBRA. Then you either have to find another job or get insurance through one of the Obamacare exchanges. What I am arguing is that this reduces the mobility of labor.

Also as someone who has switched jobs in the last year setting up new insurance/dentist/optometrist multiple times is a absolute waste of my time and would be entirely eliminated if we stopped tying insurance to the employer.

Our current system puts a huge time burden on healthcare "consumers" despite being vastly more expensive than any remotely similarly-effective system. This time burden falls largely, though not entirely, on the sick and their families. It's straight-up inhumane, given it's clearly not necessary.

It sounds to me like you are agreeing with the post you replied to, then ... which was confusing.

He is asking why is it good for the workers. You're basically advocating for price controls on one field. How would you like if you were only allowed to make $30/hr for writing code?

We already have massive shortages of doctors (and nurses, I think). This will only make it worse.

We don't have massive shortages of Doctors, we have shortages in locality. The same places where there is joblessness (think Apalachian Mining towns), you find a lack of doctors.

There's no shortages of doctors, or nurses in major cities.

https://www.google.com/search?q=doctor+shortages+usa+appalac... provides a bunch of links if you want to dive into this topic further.

AFAIK every single other OECD state has explicit or de-facto (via monopsony) price controls for much of the healthcare sector. Hell, even non-OECD free-marketer-beloved Singapore does.

I would, no kidding, love to see any example of a successful, modern healthcare system that doesn't employ price controls to keep costs from getting out of hand. Allowing "successful" and "modern" to describe the system in the US, it's the only one I know of that doesn't.

You didn't answer the question though. You just went with "well, everyone else does that".

... which means you can go look at them to see how it's working out. Again, I am legitimately interested in learning about any healthcare system in a state with an advanced economy that doesn't employ price controls in one form or another, but in the meantime, instead of spitballing about what a disaster it might be, we can just look at, AFAIK, literally any other such state to see how it works out. Dozens of examples.

> You're basically advocating for price controls on one field.

I'm not advocating for anything; it wasn't my comment. I just couldn't be sure what the poster was referring to, as the original comment was convoluted.

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