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Comment by ROTMetro | Hacker News Reader

We have socialized healthcare in the USA, we just deliver it at the emergency room, the worst possible place. The more we get people to realize that we already have this the more we can reduce the resistance to expanding it in a sane way. America 100% has socialized medicine. Go to the emergency room and you will be treated.

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I don't think that's a productive tactic-- it leads people to believe the situation isn't as bad as it is. The only people who get actually free care at the ER are too poor for debt collectors to bother harassing. There's no reality in which giving someone a bill for tens of thousands of dollars constitutes socialized medicine just because they don't have to pay upfront.

We pay for a socialized healthcare system already, we just pay the same amount again of private overhead on top of an already socialized system. Our system is just a huge waste at this point.

We certainly waste more money than we'd spend on socialized health care. I've heard plenty of people argue that we don't need socialized health care because hospitals are required to treat people without upfront payment. Those two things are only tangentially related and tying them together in that context doesn't seem like a great position to argue from.

> I've heard plenty of people argue that we don't need socialized health care because hospitals are required to treat people without upfront payment.

This is why countries like Switzerland require everyone to buy insurance. The system doesn't work if everyone freeloads.

(I guess we would still call Switzerland socialized, since the insurance prices are heavily regulated, everyone is basically in the same risk pools, and subsidies are given to those who don't meet thresholds)

If everyone in the US was in the same risk pool, and we had some good rules in place to prevent insurance company fuckery like denying legitimate claims based on spurious accusations that are difficult to prove wrong or preexisting conditions, then it probably wouldn't matter that it was private. But at that point, why make it private? If we acknowledge that insurance is so fundamental to existence that we require people to buy it, and the individual mandate says that we do, why add stockholders into the mix? At least make it a gov-owned private company like the fed if people are worried about executive dexterity.

I went the ER, was treated, and was sent a bill that must get turned over to god knows who if I didn't pay it. They took an x-ray, a blood sample, sent me home, and I got billed $4,800.

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