Having lived in a "socialised medicine" country in Australia with Medicare, and in the US with Obamacare - don't EVER let Australia turtle up Medicare. Compared to what's in place elsewhere, it's awesome. My daughter had an endoscopy recently. $11,000 USD for an hour. Obamacare is costing us about 4 times what the top level health insurance in Australia cost, and we were still billed $5k out of pocket. Apparently the fund is claiming that the unit within the hospital is not part of our plan's coverage, even though that hospital is fully covered - every department is literally it's own corporation with it's own tax number, and it turns out that the most recent tax number of the department that our daughter was admitted to was not on file at the insurer as belonging to the hospital group, so we've been denied full coverage, and billed a $5k excess by the hospital. The ridiculous thing is that the insurer sent us a decline statement, showing that the negotiated rate with the hospital for the procedure is about half of what we were charged - so if there hadn't been an administration bungle with the department's tax number, what the fund paid them anyway is all that the hospital would have received and our excess would have been $0! The excess is literally just a cash grab by the hospital because "oh your fund says it doesn't cover this procedure" (it does), the fund still paid them what they were due, so they've decided to try billing us the balance of the full charge. The hospitals charge health funds on average around half of what they bill uninsured patients. They literally double the amount so it can be sold to a debt collection agency at a discount resulting in the hospital getting the full amount they wanted, and the patient is left with a double-inflated bill in the hands of collection agencies. Still sorting that one out - and the stupid thing is that the hospital won't actually receive a cent more from the fund when the fund finally recognises that the unit is covered by our plan, and tells the hospital that we were covered. My wife literally spends about 8-10 hours a month on health insurance administration dealing with just stupid shit like $150 bills for GP visits that the health fund doesn't pay the practice in time, so the practice bill us direct at inflated rates. I think they only charge the health fund something like $60. Fund doesn't pay on time, we get sent a $150 bill instead of $60. The economic energy that Obamacare sucks out of this country is mind boggling. I forget the exact multiple of tens of thousands of new employees I heard have been hired at insurers just to process Obamacare compliant insurance because of the complexity, but it was enormous. Single physician practices often had two billing staff just to handle the paperwork. Naturally all of these jobs need to get paid for, and it's through higher health care costs and higher insurance premiums. Add to that all of the time sucked out of the general public dealing with each denied claim (EVERY claim we've had denied we've been able to get processed eventually - usually takes 4 phonecalls and one or two scan/emails). Absolute waste of business and personal time. Un-turtling-believably inefficient.
If people can't be trusted to share and look after eachother without compulsion, how the heck do you expect people to have the moral standards to hold the positions of responsibility needed to enact socialism? We can't trust the man on the street to voluntarily share his earnings to assist in housing, clothing, feeding, medicating those who cannot provide for themselves. Yet you can trust one leader to ensure the army of government employees will work honestly with the money they take by force as taxes is not misused? The problem is the left/right axis of politics is irrelevant. Even if Jesus himself won a democratic election and became president of the US, the more taxpayer money he spends on welfare, the more reliant those citizens become. So after his maximum two terms, jesus is out and the next guy has a nation of people stuck in even deeper government reliance. So no matter who is president, how good their motives are - to increase welfare assistance is to guarantee increased power over the population to the next guy. The only relevant political spectrum is freedom/oppression. Or another way of looking at it would be localization/globalization. Naturally the more people a leader governs the more power he wields. The less power those subjects wield.
