Full transcript of “Would Universal Healthcare Really Work in the U.S.?”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:03 - It's 3 a.m. and you're wide awake, your stomach is on fire. It is literally the worst pain that you've ever felt, I'm talking more painful than if Iggy Azalea and Kanye West made a duet album, because it's that painful, you head to the emergency room, the diagnosis, appendicitis. Doctors wheel you into the operating room, do their thing, and eventually, you leave the hospital, alive, minus your appendix. Modern medicine folks. Very impressive. But that's not the end of your journey. The average cost of the surgery you just had is around $15,000. Now if you happen to have good health insurance that'll probably pay for most of it. But if you have bad insurance or no insurance, you're on the hook for paying most of it, or all of it yourself, not a fun position to be in. Here in the US, we do healthcare differently than just about every other greatest country on the planet,
0:49 those countries have universal health care, where the government guarantees that everyone has access to doctors, hospitals, and medicine without having to worry about paying thousands of dollars and potentially going broke. And that leads me to the question I'm digging into for this episode. Should the US offer universal health care? In the good old US of A, how you want to pay for health care is entirely up to you as long as you have the money for it. Do you smell that? That's freedom folks. Most people choose to buy health insurance and if you're low income or over 65, you can get it from the government. But pretty much everyone else has to buy it from companies. It kind of works like car insurance. You pay a set amount of money every month, and in return the insurance company pays for most of your medical bills if you get sick or hurt.
1:36 You're insuring yourself against the big time costs. That's basically what insurance is in a nut shell. You can also choose not to buy health insurance and just pay doctors and hospitals directly. If you're young and healthy and never have to go to the doctor or a hospital, you're going to save money, but you're at risk for paying a lot of money if you do have a medical emergency like a car wreck, or you fall off your bike and break your arm. So it is a gamble. In the US around 91% of people have some form of health insurance, while the remaining 9% has no insurance. That's over 27 million people. For those that have insurance, the most common way to get it is through their job. The individual pays for part of the insurance and the employer pays the other part. It works great for a lot of people but it does have a big drawback. If you lose your job, you lose your insurance. In countries with universal health care
2:22 they don't have this problem. Insurance isn't tied to your job so you can't lose it. In fact, many people keep the same insurance for their entire life. Now you've probably heard of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. In 2010, President Obama signed it into law. It required everyone to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, and it helped lower income Americans pay for it. The main goal was to increase the number of people with insurance, but it was not universal health care. Obamacare was really controversial. It was the biggest change to healthcare in over 50 years. Some people saved money with it and loved it other people had to pay more and hated it. It was a whole thing. And when Trump became president he removed the penalty for not having insurance, that means today we remain in the healthcare system where you can choose to buy insurance or go without. Now, there are a bunch of different ways
3:07 to get universal health care, and every country does it a little bit differently. In the United Kingdom, they have what people call socialized medicine, the government owns the hospitals, and the doctors and nurses are government employees. For most medical services you don't pay anything directly, you go to the hospital, get treated and leave. There's no bill you have to pay, and you're not paying for health insurance every month. Imagine. In Canada, they have a single payer system, doctors and hospitals are private businesses, but private insurance is rare. Instead, the government provides health insurance for everyone, and they are the single payer that then pays the hospitals and the doctors every time you have an appointment. In Switzerland, people buy private insurance companies but it's heavily regulated by the government, which requires everyone to have health insurance and even pays for part of it if you don't have enough money.
3:53 It's kind of like a more intense version of Obamacare. Now, this may all sound great, but before you grab your protest sign and start picketing the streets for the US to get universal health care, remember this, it has to be paid for somehow, and the way most other countries do it is through taxes. Check out this chart. People in countries with universal health care are paying more taxes than we do here in the US. That means the government is taking even more money out of your paycheck and changing the entire healthcare system goes beyond how we pay for things, it'll affect how we access doctors and medications, and it might affect the quality of care we get. Okay, so how does the US compare to all these other countries? To answer that, we talked to T.R. Reid, he's a journalist and author who wrote The Healing of America, which looks at how healthcare works around the world. - We pay more for health care than any other country
4:40 by a huge amount, we pay about twice as much as people in France, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Italy, Spain, pay, even though they cover everybody and have better overall health statistics. - Check out these numbers. Healthcare spending per person in the US is around $10,000 per year. All the other countries with universal health care are spending around $5,000 per year. We're paying for the cost of two universal health care systems without getting universal health care. A big reason for this is that our system isn't one system. It's a bunch of difference systems. There are hundreds of health insurance companies and they all do billing differently. It's just a bunch of paperwork. These companies also spend millions on advertising and salaries for high paid executives, the result is that almost everything costs more in the US.
5:26 Remember that appendix you got removed for $15,000? In the UK, it's under $10,000. An MRI is almost $1200 in the US, but under 600 in Switzerland, and the list goes on. - If we covered everybody with a sensible single system with the same rules, and the same fees for everybody, we would cut our costs by billions of dollars, it's just much cheaper to run a coordinated system that covers everybody. - Basically, the simpler the healthcare system, more money you as a patient save, and that's what universal healthcare gives you. The US also has another unique problem, almost 9% of our population has no insurance at all. That's 27 million people. For most of them, it's not that they're choosing not to buy it, it's that they can't afford it,
6:12 and their job doesn't offer it as benefit. - In the United States, according to the US government, 22,000 Americans, 22,000 die every year of treatable diseases, because they couldn't afford to go to the doctor. That is we could have treated that person and saved their life, but she died because she didn't have health insurance. - And when people do pay, they often struggle to come up with the money. In the US, two out of every three bankruptcies are tied to medical issues, that just doesn't happen in countries universal health care, but the cost of healthcare isn't everything. We want it to be high quality, and that costs money. In the US, we spend billions of dollars every year on cutting edge research and drug development, those companies are competing with each other to make a profit, that spurs innovation. Switching to universal healthcare could change that.
7:00 You might be able to cover more people, but they may not have access to the best treatments. To discuss these trade offs, we talked to Chris Pope who researches healthcare policy at the Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative think tank. - I think universal health care is basically the idea that everyone has some sort of health insurance coverage. Now, what does your insurance cover is an issue that can vary enormously. Coverage can provide great access to care everywhere, or it can provide access to very limited package benefits with very high out of pocket costs. - Remember, 90% of Americans already have health insurance. Completely changing the entire healthcare system will be disruptive. People who have private insurance and like it might be forced to give it up. On top of that, universal health care means
7:46 the government has a much bigger role in deciding who and what gets covered. Some care might be rationed which means the government decides who gets what and when. - And a typical thing that gets rationed would be knee surgery or hip surgery, if you need this kind of joint surgery in these countries you might be waiting for months or the best part of the year to get access to care. Also the most expensive drugs. There are a lot of new cancer drugs that available in the United States. In Britain and Canada these aren't going to be available necessarily to much of the population. - Instead of bringing the government in to healthcare, why not take employers out of it? Remember, most Americans get insurance through their jobs, but it doesn't have to be that way. - I think it's a big opportunity for change and improvement in American healthcare is really to let individuals buy health insurance
8:34 on the same terms that their employers can. If it was an individual that controlled the insurance, it would be your insurance, you would own it, and you will have a right to renew it as you move from job to job. - Oh, hey there. Thanks for making it to the end of the video. We know that that was a lot of information that we threw at you. So just to make sure that we're all on the same page, I thought it'd be cool if we did a quick little recap, just to make sure that we all understand universal health care. So, the pros for it, are that everyone would have access to it, it wouldn't be tied directly to your job and going to the doctor or to the hospital will cost a lot less money. Now the arguments against it are that your taxes may have to go up to pay for it, the quality of care may not be the same, and with more government control, the individual has less choice. So, do you think that America should keep doing health care the same way?
9:20 Should we switch to a universal health care system, or should we do something different entirely? Now this is a big issue on the elections because you know, eventually everybody's gonna have to go to the doctor. And as always, leave us a comment below. Oh, I forgot. If you liked this video, check out our other video with universal in the title, all about universal basic income. When you watch it it'll all make sense, I promise, they connect, I swear they do. I'm your host, Myles Best. Till next time, peace out.
