Naïve European who'd pay nothing for this here (ok, taxes, but supposedly we still pay fewer % of our GDP overall) with a question:
I’ll have to have to pay less than 6% of that, because I’m lucky enough to still have insurance.
Why? If you have insurance, shouldn't that cover the whole expense? Or is it a bit like an excess on a car insurance policy? Can you get insurance that covers everything?
Did you ever have car insurance or any other kind of insurance? Most insurances have deductibles, and the point of that is that insurance is to prevent catastrophic loss, not every expense. There can be insurance that covers 100% of expenses, but it will be very expensive, especially for health, as it won't be insurance at all.
Imagine that 1000 people pay each $100 into insurance pool. Then if somebody has a problem there's $100000 available for him, and if the chance of this problem is 1/1000, then this works. Now imagine each of these people has $50 in regular expenses that they want to be paid from the same pool. Then to get the same coverage one needs either to pay additional $50 into the pool (which then is not insurance but just a very expensive savings account) or accept that his coverage dropped by half. And that's not counting insurance company's cut, which makes it worse.
Did you ever have car insurance or any other kind of insurance?
Yes. I go with the largest excess possible (what I assume is also called a deductible) because the chance of making a claim is low. But it's only 10-20% more to have no excess at all.
The logic in your second paragraph makes sense on the surface, but the lack of a deductible in many European-style health systems doesn't seem to result in a larger share of GDP being spent on health (which is notoriously high in the US) or the healthcare being of a lower quality.
The difference between medical & car insurance is certainity of small expenses. If your insurance covered regular maintenance of the car, it would be substantially more expensive.
I’ll have to have to pay less than 6% of that, because I’m lucky enough to still have insurance.
Why? If you have insurance, shouldn't that cover the whole expense? Or is it a bit like an excess on a car insurance policy? Can you get insurance that covers everything?