Health Care

One of the great things about NZ is that it has universal health care. Now compared to the private, employer-provided health insurance I had in the US, there are some downsides to this. For example, routine visits to a physician are more than a $10 co-pay. You pay about $100. But everyone has the same privileges. And for those who are really concerned about waiting lists and whatnot (more on those in a moment), you can get supplemental private insurance.

Americans, though, are absurdly resistant to the idea of state-provided, universal health insurance. I just finished reading what I consider to be a knock-down argument against that resistance: check out the recent article by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in the New York Review of Books. It pretty much destroys every argument I've ever heard in favor of the US system.

For those who worry about efficiency, here's one of the money quotes (pardon the pun):

"the available evidence suggests that if the US were to replace its current [system] with standardized, universal coverage, the savings would be so large that we could cover all those currently uninsured, yet end up spending less overall."

For those who worry about waiting lists for critical procedures, note that, here in NZ at least, there are no waiting lists if it's urgent, though there can be for serious but non-life-threatening problems (e.g., cancer treatment). And, just for good measure, note that "the procedures for which these waiting lists exist account for only 3% of US health care spending." Finally, again, if you really want the wealthy to be able to skip ahead of those lines, there's always supplemental private insurance.

Hard to see how American conservatives can continue to rail against universal health care, given that they want their taxes reduced so much.

Of course, the key part in all this is that, in the end, given that citizens all contribute to a cooperative society, in which the wealthy already benefit by having the unmeritably less wealthy do tasks that free the wealthy to accumulate their greater wealth, those with less wealth shouldn't have to expect much less physical well-being than those with great wealth.