- Joined
- Oct 21, 2015
- Messages
- 53,813
- Reaction score
- 10,864
- Location
- Kentucky
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Slightly Conservative
1. You will notice that I mentioned a system of Medicaid, Medicare and ER. I did not say anything about Medicaid patients using ER as a prime supplier. BTW, they are having a hard time in Germany right now, because so many are using ER instead of going to their GP. The reasons are manifold.
2.3. Germany has a plethora of Krankenkassen which are financially backed by the regional governments and run through an intransparent system of oversight with different premiums and to an extent coverage. A thus ensured person can take out supplemental private policy to get better and more costly treatments. Many do this because the public coverage is not good and its quality is being reduced. Next to this you can take out only private insurance, if you earn enough. These policies offer a wide arrange of different coverage mixes.
Since I have a chronic condition I have talked to people all over the world (including Germany) and have heard a uuuuuuge bevy of complaints from all of their UHC systems and many of them have to purchase extra insurance if they want better care. Most of them think that their system is far better than the US because they hear the horror stories about people going bankrupt due to medical conditions, without realizing that those horror stories, while true, make up a very small minority of the population. They also mistakenly believe that only the rich can get good care and the poor are thrown out in the street to fend for themselves, not realizing that most of the poor actually get free care, even before Obamacare. Statistics liberals often like to quote are just statistics with no input of the real world and the human factor. As in your example, liberals would say that Germans have better healthcare than here in the US because they have UHC and we don't, without really realizing the nuts and bolts and the human factor such as you describe.