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It is immoral to force one person to provide service to you at a price YOU want to pay, rather than the price he wants to charge. The only way to make that happen is threatening violence. Which is what the State does utilizing the powers of taxation and regulation. Under penalty of imprisonment or financial ruin.
So socialized medicine is inherently immoral because it price fixes doctor fees and drug prices. It is monopoly, it is price fixing, and it is anti-freedom.
You have no right to health care, and no right to cheap health care, and no right to affordable health care. If you want to control your medical costs, buy health insurance in the open market. THAT is moral and free. If you don't like the costs or the government influence, remove government from the equation so there is no one to influence. The government should not be involved in medicine at all. And all the high costs we see are a direct result of State involvement and corruption of the medical and insurance fields.
Remember when medical care was a private service and the doctor used to come to your bloody house with his little black bag? Of course you don't. Can anyone imagine that happening now in the Byzantine State Labyrinth we now ludicrously and tragically refer to as a health care "system"?
My great-grandfather was such a doctor. Going through his papers we found a large number of IOUs from patients who couldn't pay along with a number of receipts for services paid for in livestock--cows, pigs, and chickens. Try paying for health care these days with livestock and see what happens.
Comparing infant mortality rates between countries is problematic because of differing definitions of stillbirths.
In the US, a 14 week miscarried fetus with a heartbeat or that gasps for breath is a live birth. in some other countries, any fetus that would not potentially be able to survive is counted as a stillbirth, even if it has a heartbeat when delivered.
Some countries do not even attempt to save the tiniest premature babies, many of which are aggressively treated in the US.
Not every country collects infant death statistics the way the US does. Many under report.
There is no such thing as obscene profits in a free system. All profits are justified, correct, and result from free and voluntary trade. Someone who provides something good that everyone wants should be a trillionaire and that is totally fine, just, proper, moral, good, correct, healthy, and fair.
Drug companies that research and invent useful drugs that solve problems should make billions and billions of dollars.
And Madame Curie and Louis Pasteur wanted to be paid for their expertise just like you, just like your mother, just like your father, and just like your kids. It's human nature, and it is GOOD to want to trade your talent and time for good old money.
I want a system based on trade where people are free to pursue their talents and offer us amazing medical services and cures for disease. That system has a name: Capitalism.
You can't have that without policies that would be even more controversial than full socialized medicine. Like increasing the supply of doctors like Milton Friedman advocated years ago, or issuing H1-Bs en masse to foreign doctors. Unfortunately, both immigration and health care are hot button issues themselves, and the nexus of both of those would be super controversial. It would be politically safer even to have a full NHS in America than it would be to have a free market system
Oh dear OP left out life expectancy where the USA ranks well below many socialized medicine countries.........oh well...living a longer life means nothing -- pfffftt......
And I think if we take another step back, we can examine how those high costs impact our economy. If we visualize the economy as a gigantic pie, and slices go to various economic pursuits, like education, manufacturing, technology, and so on, then we need to understand that at any given moment the pie is finite. The pie is all the resources we have. And there are only so many resources we have. As the demand for healthcare will grow (we know that as we age we need more healthcare services, and we know that we have an aging population, and we know that Baby Boomers represent a huge wave of consumers who are on the brink of demanding increased healthcare services), the resources of an economy will shift to meet that demand. Because as a nation we are already devoting a much greater portion of our pie to healthcare, and we are looking at that portion increasing exponentially to meet the Baby Boomer demand, what does that mean to other economic sectors? If all of our resources are going to healthcare, then what happens to education, technology, manufacturing?
This is the behemoth our government is ignoring. Other countries with socialized medicine developed laws and strategies to control costs. We didn't. The pie was so big, we thought it was infinite. It's not. And we have deliberately avoided developing laws and strategies to control costs. We have willingly allowed ourselves to subsidize healthcare around the world, and in exchange we've patted ourselves on the back for having the best medical services available, but only if you could pay for it. While the rest of the world has worked toward providing medical services to the most people. And instead of awards, they've gotten healthier populations with greater longevity.
There is no such thing as obscene profits in a free system. All profits are justified, correct, and result from free and voluntary trade. Someone who provides something good that everyone wants should be a trillionaire and that is totally fine, just, proper, moral, good, correct, healthy, and fair.
Drug companies that research and invent useful drugs that solve problems should make billions and billions of dollars.
And Madame Curie and Louis Pasteur wanted to be paid for their expertise just like you, just like your mother, just like your father, and just like your kids. It's human nature, and it is GOOD to want to trade your talent and time for good old money.
I want a system based on trade where people are free to pursue their talents and offer us amazing medical services and cures for disease. That system has a name: Capitalism.
Nothing may seem obscene to you.
To me when a drug company buys the production of an established drug and then raises the price 6000%, that's obscene. In our system, with insurance companies involved, free and voluntary doesn't happen. The consumer isn't paying the real price, so market controls don't happen.
Madame Curie did what she did for the love of science.
Your want here is out of touch with reality. The system we have means that the United States is underwriting healthcare in the rest of the world, inflating costs in the United States. And you're not going to change that by thinking the system will correct itself.
And we don't get medical cures. We get treatments to live with our diseases. Because it's more profitable.
Curie and Pasteur were interested in cures. The pharmaceutical industry of today isn't.
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