Not intimately familiar with this system but I submit that the cost of such a program would make it non feasible considering that we have a population of non citizens that even our government cannot quantify who may burden any healthcare system beyond the level of the citizenry to be taxed to pay for it.

[freebeacon.com]

[freebeacon.com]

Canada has socialised health care. Not sure how it compares to Sweden. Ours mostly covers family doctors visits, specialist visits and hospital coverage.
Everything else is usually covered by employee benefit plans. Drug, dental, vision, eye glasses/contacts, prosthesis, massage therapy, physio etc. If you don't have a benefit plan you pay out of pocket or purchase your own benefit plan independently through a broker.
Canadian taxes are very high as are Sweden's. Over half our earnings goes to pay taxes. A majority of these taxes goes to socialized health care.
Problems- physicians are paid by the government. They make peanuts compared to US doctors. There's a lack of doctors in a lot of areas and it can take weeks to get a 5 minute appointment. Walk in clinics have been set up to compensate but you can expect to wait several hours to be seen.
The same goes for the hospitals. If you have to go to emergency, expect to wait 10-12 hours before being seen. If you require surgery, say a gallbladder operation, expect to wait 6-12 months to get scheduled.
Cataract surgery the same.
You will get surgery for more pressing issues like a burst appendix quickly after the 12 hour emerged wait.
Cancer treatment is OK but again a lot of equipment like resonance scans are only located in major cities and people from out of town will have to travel hours away at their own expense to get these done. The equipment is too expensive for the government to supply them to smaller hospitals and often communities have fundraisers to try and purchase these types of equipment.
I'm not sure how the US model works but it seems their health care system is much more efficient and humane. Canada's health care system is tedious and inefficient. Doctors don't take the time here to really assess what could be wrong with you. It's like an assembly line. Dr.-"How can I help you today?" Patient-"I don't feel good. My throat hurts." Dr.- "Here's a prescription. Next!"

Uhhh...you're the one making the assertion. How about you take a little time, explain your position, the Scandinavian model of health care, how it would be implemented in the US, and THEN I might make an argument against...or I might agree. Onus Probandi as it's called is on you, not me - just as it is on people who believe in god( s ), aliens, big foot, and a free socialism lunch. Come on @svenskost, you can do better than this. This is basic debating 101 stuff.

[en.wikipedia.org]

I won't try to change your mind. I agree with you! I also agree with everyone who says that models that work in one country can't work in another country unmodified. You need the blend of mechanisms that work in each jurisdiction. In the US it would probably be implemented state-by-state, like in Canada, not federally.

The blend of funding and governance mechanisms is key. I think healthcare is a complex industry, not a single system. There are all kinds of business/service models possible for different organizations - public and private - within that system.

I've usually lived in countries with single-payer medical care systems (in 3 of the countries that have 0.0 in the right-hand column of this table - [en.wikipedia.org] plus one additional country with less socialized medicine than the US). I would never want to live in anything but the top-ranked countries here.

However, there have always been some products and services you pay for - e.g. non-emergency dental care, medications (unless you're destitute), many kinds of elective surgery, and all "alternative therapies"...

So I pay for a lot of things (meds, dentist, glasses, little things like doctor's letters if you have to go on medical leave). It amounts to a few thousand dollars a year, in my case. Employer-provided group benefit plans really make a difference! Otherwise it would be a few grand more.

There'd be more pickup on the government side if my household was a lot poorer, but we do okay.

I don't feel limited in my individual sovereignty at all. Why would I?

All countries have socialized roads, and schools, at least to some degree. When you take your vehicle out on the open road, I don't think you feel less free - like you just got trapped by the system and have the government monkey on your back.

By comparison, I don't think you'd feel more free if you paid a cash toll on every stretch of road, to whatever company owned that stretch - because they decided it would be profitable enough to build and maintain a road there.

If all roads were private toll roads, you'd probably want a pass that just lets you ride all of them, which would make them "club goods". Though I'm not an economist, I think a lot of components of the health care system are productively managed as "club goods".

[en.wikipedia.org]

Clubs are not made better by being turned into markets. A health club would not be improved if, instead of one membership fee getting you a card that lets you use any machine you want, each exercise station was a private booth, like at an amusement park, with people taking your money, or if each one needed a credit-card swipe like a gas pump.

You would have to pay for time on each one separately, and advertising and hype would likely invade the market even more than it already does.

The transaction costs could introduce enough disutility to destroy the value proposition of the market.

In a way it might be more fair, because people only pay for what they use, plus a fee to the company running the exercise "fairground" on every transaction... but clubs do exist for good economic reasons.

In healthcare, I don't need something expensive like a CAT-scan today, but I benefit from being a member in a club where such an exotic piece of equipment is available.

Club goods are excludable but non-rivalrous. ( [thoughtco.com] ) People without a government insurance card, or non-citizens, cannot access them. You need access to the club. At that point, you use the goods and services you need to use until the system gets congested (it always does in healthcare), and then you need to manage the congestion problem.

There are lots of ways to do this, including judiciously spinning some services back out into the private sector, shifting investment to things like home-based care or e-medicine, etc. Not everything in healthcare is a club good, private good, public good, or common good/common-pool resource.

Healthcare provision involves all these kinds of goods, and so a variety of mechanisms are needed for a healthcare system to function well (to produce intended outcomes effectively and efficiently).

Some healthcare services will simply not be provided by the market because it's not profitable. Nutrition counseling is expensive to provide, and hard to charge a lot for except to upscale clients. It's much more profitable to sell drugs and procedures for diseases of overconsumption, when people have less/no choice about spending that money.

Some healthcare services are good to put on the market. Where I live, ketamine treatment for treatment-resistant depression is regulated by the healthcare system. You need a doctor's referral attesting to your condition, treatment history, status and all the rest. However, the actual procedure is not covered at all by insurance - public or private. It's $3K, all out-of-pocket.

This allows some well-regulated procedures with acceptable risks to be made available to people, without adding it to the public-insurance pool until the cost-benefit proposition becomes clear.

Anyhow - enough of this for now.

No thanks let's remover the lawyers and much of the insurance bullshit brought on because of malpractice insurance. also the AMA needs to be reigned in. Then the education system needs to change and not be for profit and the whole time they are working and schooling they start at the bottom and work up thru the ranks. Yes future DR will be wiping asses and changing bed pans to start. with humble starts they will learn how to heal not just "be a DR". This will cut costs and can be used as free or super cheap health care while they are at "school".Individual Freedom and freedom of choice is more important than the bs group think known as society.

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