Health Care Cost: Fill & Download for Free

I keep seeing this objection to universal health care, and I scratch my damn head every single time. The idea that the US is “too big” for universal health care makes me want to channel my inner Samuel L. Jackson and say, “Statistics, motherfucker! Do you speak it?”The larger a country, the easier it is to provide universal health care.Grab one person at random. How expensive will their medical care be over their entire lifetime? You have no idea. They might go years without spending a dime. They might develop a weird, rare form of cancer that costs three million dollars to treat. You don’t know.Get a six-sided die. Roll it. What number will you get?Could be a 1. Could be a 6. You don’t know. There is high individual uncertainty.Ah, but … aggregate uncertainty leads to high cumulative certainty. Add up 300,000,000 die rolls and you can predict what the total will be. Add up 300,000,000 people’s medical bills and you can predict exactly what the cost will be. The higher the number, the better your prediction.A country with 300 citizens would not be able to offer universal health care, because it would not be able to predict health-care cost.A country with 300 million citizens can predict health-care cost very accurately indeed.Why is this not easy to understand? Larger population means larger revenue base and larger risk pool. That makes health-care cost predictions more accurate, and therefore universal health care easier.As I write this answer, someone on Quora is creating phony profiles that look just like mine, and using them to send abusive/harassing messages to people. If you receive an abusive PM or comment, check the profile carefully. It probably isn’t me. Reference herein to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement by the United States Government.

Daniel Lee Halm disabled comments on his reply, so I’ll put my comments on his reply here:He said, “The USA has the second-lowest personal income tax rates in the world second only to Ireland.”No, it doesn’t. There are 100 countries in the world that have lower personal income tax rates than the US. These are mostly third world countries such as Mexico and Brazil (although they are moving into the first world and actually have “free” health care systems, although probably not as good as the US.)There are ten countries in the world which have no personal income tax at all. These are tax havens like Bermuda or Arab oil states like Saudi Arabia. Most of these have “free” health care paid for by tourists and international businesses, or by oil revenues. The US likes to tax its citizens in those countries to avoid them getting away from its own tax system. The US is the only developed country that does that.Disturbingly though, Canada now has a lower personal income tax rate than the US due to tax cuts over the last couple of decades. Of course, Canada has universal health care. One of the main reasons it can is that Canada doesn’t spend nearly as much on the military as the US does, and can put the tax money into social services instead. Another reason is that its overall health care costs are only half as high as they are in the US due to price controls, lower billing costs, and lower fees paid to doctors and hospitals. The same is true of other countries which have “free” health insurance.The US has by far the highest health care costs in the world, not to mention the highest military expenditures. Not the lowest taxes, though.

I am in the process of moving out of the US, where I have lived for 50 years, to Canada. I expect to have my Canadian work visa on July 6.I am moving out of the US for several reasons:I am a small business owner, and have been since the 90s. Canada has a better business climate for small business than the US does. My partner Eve and I cofounded a tech startup two years ago, and opted to do it in BC rather than the US because of this.Canada has better health care coverage than the US, with lower health care costs.Canada’s civil infrastructure is superior to that of the US. The US has not properly maintained its infrastructure for decades.Canada is not spending trillions of dollars of borrowed money on pointless and stupid wars.