Subjectively

That’s 110 degrees for the rest of you out there.

I was reading this discussion on Mark Drumms wall. There are many facts that I don’t think anybody is getting.
A bit of background first. I spent almost 12 years in Germany. Many of those years I had AOK insurance, which is the mandatory minimum socialized insurance. Let me explain some of the “benefits” to you from the perspective of someone who has lived with it for an extended period of time.
Europe had a very lopsided population spread after WWII. Most of the aged adult population was dead. In order to rebuild the country, migrant workers were brought in. Most of those were from Turkey. Germans started this system when the number of payers far exceeded the number of payouts. Initially, it took many years from the time a dollar was put into the system to the time it was paid out to a citizen. Migrants paid in, but were not expected to be there long enough to get a payout.
The system was cash rich, and the benefits flowed in the land of milk and honey. As the population aged, the payments began to have a much shorter gap to the payouts. By the time I left in 1996, it was only about 3 months from input to output. As the gap closed, the shenanigans began.
Pharmaceuticals began to cost more to subsidize the system for the medical community. The government responded by fixing the amount of money it was willing to pay on the mandatory insurance. Private sector responded in kind by setting the prices at (go figure) EXACTLY the same price that the government would pay. Initially, this was beneficial to the patient who needed expensive drugs, and detrimental to the guy who needed an aspirin. Eventually, it was detrimental to everybody. This system evolved into effective government price fixing of pharmaceuticals.
The next measure was to start fixing the price of services. This works very similar to what we do with HMO, so I won’t describe it in detail. Suffice it to say that it was implemented nationwide, which disallowed any other choices. Goodbye personal plans (PPO). In order to qualify for those you had to make cutoff salaries that were far out of reach of the people that the mandatory insurance was originally intended to service.
In order to stop the malpractice insurance problem that doctors have in the US, they simply limited the amount of money that could be awarded in a malpractice suit. Sounds simple right? Except that your life now has a very attainable price tag on it, and you would be an idiot to believe that the doctors don’t know exactly what it is.
At this point, government officials sit in a room and argue over pennies of how much medicine should cost, whether it is financially viable to bother to save your life, whether your life is worth saving anyway, and whether or not they should get the “silver” wash or the “premium” wash on their Mercedes.
The Europeans started this system when they were cash rich and payout poor. How long to you think it will take the US to fail with this when we are deficit rich and government management idiots?