Socialized Medicine - off topic

Geebra,

My best to you mother, as she recovers from such a complex surgery, especially at her advanced age. That is a lot to have gone through at one time.

David in SC

I am in the same camp as Billy downunder and David in SC. But for Medicare, my Goose would be very well cooked. One oddity is to talk of "health insurance" as if it were insurance the way say house insurance is. Most people will not experience lossof their home, so home insurance really is for rare events. By contrast, barring sudden trauma, just about everyone with get sick. What we really do is pool money for events that sooner or later strike us all -- to me how the money is pooled just comes down to what is most efficient. Medicare wins the overhead part of that argument hands down. What Medicare and private insurers are not good at are controlling physician and hospital fees. Until that end is seriously looked at, not how the money is pooled, the trajectory for costs in the US is pretty bad.

NewspaperLover

I know a little bit about both worlds, but don't claim to know more than anyone else. My wife and her mother are English. I'm American. My wife moved to U.S. in 1979 -- we were married in 1985. My mother-in-law stayed in England until her late 80s (by which time my wife was spending more time there than here, until she finally convinced her mom to move to U.S. and live with us). While in the U.K, my mom-in-law broke her hip. She had poor initial service. There were several days in which the visiting nurse didn't believe it was a break. But I'm not sure if this denial was the fault of the visiting nurse of my mother-in-law's obstinacy. I might not be any better at 87 or so and fearing a one-way-trip to the nursing home.

Once my M-I-L got to the hospital a few days later, they did a hip transplant, rehab, etc. pretty much the same as they would have done here.

After my M-I-L move to the States to live with us, she enrolled as an individual member in Blue Cross (she would have needed to live here for 5 years as a "green card" resident alien before she would qualify for Medicare.) Over the next 4 years until her death (which was ultimately of septicemia from the same hip implant) she was in and out of the hospital here in the U.S. many times and was ultimately in hospice care at home. I can't say she was treated either better or worse by the English system or by the U.S. system. The U.S. system certainly cost her more out of pocket every month. Fortunately she was able to pay it, in part because we put a roof over her head. But I can't say if she'd have got better or worse treatment over her last four years or lived longer, shorter, better, or worse if she had stayed in England.