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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

The last thing I want at that time is to have to reason about any of this.

I think I’m realizing that what I cherish about the healthcare system up here is not just that I don’t pay bills, but that I don’t even see a bill. Not that the bankruptcy inducing costs aren’t wretched, but I just cannot even imagine being put into a fucked up bureaucratic hell while my family is in a life altering crisis.

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This applies to other things as well - retirement and education come to mind.

Anecdote: my uncle and BIL are auto mechanics. One in the US, the other in Scotland. Similar lifestyles - both own homes, have mechanical hobbies (vintage cars for one, Harleys for the other) - typical working class lives. The uncle in the UK just has much less mental overhead when it comes to major life planning.

Many here will say that that's the cost of the freedom of choice and speech in the US.

And yet we have ICE and the FBI harassing “dissidents” every day, medical choices dictated by insurance companies, and on and on. They’ve been sold a bill of goods and just haven’t realized it yet, IMO.

It's from a fictional drama (The Newsroom) but this a great riposte to "freedom in the US".

    You're going to say that we're the only ones in the world that has freedom?
    Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom.

https://youtu.be/wTjMqda19wk?t=95

Yea I think this is the bit thats easy to take for granted in nations with rational healthcare systems. Not only do I not get fleeced, but at no point does my healthcare feel like economic activity, a transaction, it feels like healthcare and that the provision of it is being done for the right reasons.

Medicaid is actually like this incidentally. No copays really. Too bad the electeds don't want to roll it out. The a lot of the most expensive risk pools are already on medicaid or medicare.

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