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Comment by marris | Hacker News Reader

Two issues:

- Many people don't spend every penny they have. They spend every penny they can get out of their health plan. That's not a "market failure" by any means agreed?

- If they must pay out of pocket, and they have no kids, then why not? If they do have kids, then that seems a bit selfish to me. Maybe the right thing to do is save the money and buy cheap painkillers.

Not every sad story is Oliver Twist. And the argument that single-payer health-care will be cheaper is a crap-shoot at best. The countries that do it well do many things well. I don't see dramatic savings from US single-payer education. Or from single-payer defense spending.

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Not agreed. Health related debt is the largest cause of bankruptcy in the US, and most of those who go bankrupt this way are insured.

Compare that with the number of healthcare related bankruptcies in say, the UK.

Even in single payer systems, bankruptcy is often the result of medical issues. You have to remember that many conditions prevent you from working, so even if your medical bills are paid, you still can't afford your daily expense.

Interestingly, it turns out that research commissioned by the Canadian government shows that 15% of people over the age of 55 who declare bankruptcy cite a medical problem as the primary reason. Medical bankruptcies can, as I've been saying for a while, be driven by something other than the lack of free government provided medical care.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/09/bankrupt...

True but irrelevant, since there is a huge difference between being bankrupted by the medical system itself, and bankrupted because you can't afford not to work (which can happen for many other reasons and is a separate problem to guard oneself against).

I don't think it's irrelevant at all. People throw out the statistic that X% of Americans go bankrupt because of medical problems inferring it's because we don't have single-payer healthcare.

The statistic about Canada backs up the idea that isn't true.

It doesn't back up the idea at all. The bankruptcies in Canada have nothing to do with medical costs.

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