> " it gets skimmed off by insurers, drug companies, individual practitioners, hospitals"
7% goes to the insurers and it's not like there aren't equivalent workers doing much of the same work in your healthcare system for similar costs. Maybe it's slightly more efficient, but not by much.
As for being "skimmed" by practitioners and hospitals... that's a weird word to use, since they're just being paid for their services.
You also have to understand that, since you don't experience the US healthcare system directly, the only thing you're going to read is people complaining. The wait times for many services in the US are vastly shorter than they are in government run systems. For an example, same day MRIs are available in some cases or with a day or two wait in most cases.
The short wait times are because of the higher costs/smaller number of people having access to MRIs. It's a tradeoff, and honestly I don't think it's worth it.
The point is that we pay more and actually get things for it. I think a lot of the people commenting from outside the US think we pay more and have a lower level of service than they do, which is incorrect.
That is true, but we also get a lot of things we don't need because the provider knows that insurance will reimburse it. My wife spent some time in the hospital recently and the number of tests they performed was truly staggering. When I asked the technician performing one of the scans what it would show, his response was "probably nothing, but we just do it because we can."
I contrast that with my experience in my home country when I ruptured my ACL and required surgery. I visited the specialist who immediately diagnosed the problem after a quick exam and told me that we could do an MRI but that would be a waste of time as it wouldn't reveal anything we didn't already know. I was booked in for surgery the next day with a minimum of fuss.
7% goes to the insurers and it's not like there aren't equivalent workers doing much of the same work in your healthcare system for similar costs. Maybe it's slightly more efficient, but not by much.
As for being "skimmed" by practitioners and hospitals... that's a weird word to use, since they're just being paid for their services.
You also have to understand that, since you don't experience the US healthcare system directly, the only thing you're going to read is people complaining. The wait times for many services in the US are vastly shorter than they are in government run systems. For an example, same day MRIs are available in some cases or with a day or two wait in most cases.