Obama

[Alex]

Originally Posted by scaeagles

I realize that this isn't a life saving procedure, but it sure would suck if she missed her sophomore season because she couldn't get surgery in a timely fashion.

You'll be able to find all kinds of individual stats that show one advantage here or a disadvantage there. Helping the U.S. in these arguments is that our lack of a central health care system means that similar statistics are nearly impossible to find.

Here's a Business Week article (hardly a bastion of liberal tendencies) on wait times in the United States. Note that in L.A. they reported the wait time to even see an orthopedic surgeon as 43 days. And Americans are less likely to even seek medical treatment because of difficulty in seeing primary care physicians quickly.

But in the tradition of anecdotes, here's mine.

My then unemployed (and therefore uninsured) sister was 28 when she experienced a spontaneous pneumothorax requiring several weeks of hospitalization and eventually surgery on one of her lungs. She could not be scheduled for that surgery until she had coughed up a 10% down payment on the expected cost. Everybody involved knew that she would never be able to pay the other 90% but the decision was made to take whatever personal credit blow would result from defaulting on that debt in order to have surgery. Of course there was the matter of 10%.

What was 10% of a 2-hour surgery where they fudged the numbers to keep the cost as low as possible? $15,000. Which I paid out of pocket so my sister could continue to have two functioning lungs.

I'm out $15k. My sister is has destroyed credit. My mom suffered the humiliation of begging around for money. The hospital and doctors took a bath on their costs.

All becaue it turns out an otherwise pretty healthy (she's the only non-obese one in the family) 28 year old had a genetically unsound lung.

How would that have played out in the United Kingdom?