[NickMPK]

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Medicine is like a three legged stool -
-- leg one --- cutting edge technology
-- leg two --- immediate care (on demand)
-- leg three -- for free, or pretty close for free.

The deal is, you can have any two of the three - but not all of them.

Immediate care for free - third world medicine - you may have someone shaking a chicken over your head to cure your brain tumor, but the price is right, and you can have it today.

Cutting edge care for free (or low cost) - to some degree, the socialized medicine countries do this. You may wait 8 mos to get your gallbladder out, or not be allowed dialysis if you're over a certain age. Does keep the costs down, at some social cost.

Cutting edge today - our current model, for the most part. INSANELY expensive, but pretty good care, when you need it.

BUT YOU CAN'T have all three. As a society, we have elected to ignore this.....which is why we're in the spot we're in.

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My impression is that most state-funded health care systems in the world have both "immediate care for free" and "cutting edge care for free", they just don't have "immediate cutting edge care".

You can get rare and expensive procedures, but you have to wait, as you point out. But you can also get any procedure that can be done in a an emergency room or a general practioner's office much faster than you can in the US. And this isn't third-world medicine....it is totally effective at solving probably 98% of people's medical problems.

As for the US, I don't know if people would describe waiting five hours in an emergency room, or a month for a check-up with their family doctor as "immediate care".

One of the biggest problems with the free-market structure of the US system is that it encourages doctors to go into specialties where there is a lot of money, but not necessarily a lot of patients. As a result, there are an overabundance of doctors willing to do rare and expensive procedures (and an overabundance of companies creating equipment for rare and expensive procedures), but not enough doctors to do the routine stuff, because it is much more of a pain getting paid for the routine.