fractalfeline: I'm somewhat tempted to move to the Netherlands now XD. And good points 
(Stuff is fragmented but meh, not in the mood for writing an essay)
Anyway, when this gets brought up elsewhere, a lot of people who seem pretty "Yeah, well, I know everything about the bill :|" seem to have simply been watching too much one-sided sensationalized TV reporting. e.g. (quite literally) "OMG THEY GET TO PICK WHO TO KILL," "We're all communists" (seriously), and so on. Some wouldn't even know the difference between HMOs and PPOs while complaining about all the problems. hurr. Still, the US health system is messed up just from how it started and how individualistic people are, which isn't always a bad thing. Part of all the absurd prices could be for recouping R&D costs. For every successful drug, there are plenty of other failed drugs and wasted money. Still, some degree of price control would be good, though I don't see how it's feasible with how many issues there are.
One of the biggest things that gets brought up is with mandatory care and people protesting about how unfair that is, but they fail to consider that letting everyone opt in whenever would mean too little money in the system for the people who are sick to use. After all, who wants to spend money on "nothing"?
The other thing is that it clearly isn't working. No insurance and you're screwed here, unless people consider going to the emergency room in the most severe cases working. In some urban areas, some people will preventative tests done and not receive the results for over half a year. A lot of the urban centers are simply too overwhelmed, but that's still pretty absurd. There are also other problems, but I think that it'd have the potential to get to ranty-like.
The way that the Obama administration introduced and handled things could definitely have been smoother, and there are still issues, but it's better than anyone else can say that they've done. I definitely agree that it seems more punishment-based. It could also fail miserably, though, which would cause it to have even less chance of success later on, which would be unfortunate. It'd also be nice to give more people a chance to improve their daily lives for something so easily taken for granted as good health.
(Despite all the complaining, though, I still have to say that living in the US is pretty great... I just don't want to think about how screwed I'd be if I ended up having severe medical issues.)
(Stuff is fragmented but meh, not in the mood for writing an essay)
Anyway, when this gets brought up elsewhere, a lot of people who seem pretty "Yeah, well, I know everything about the bill :|" seem to have simply been watching too much one-sided sensationalized TV reporting. e.g. (quite literally) "OMG THEY GET TO PICK WHO TO KILL," "We're all communists" (seriously), and so on. Some wouldn't even know the difference between HMOs and PPOs while complaining about all the problems. hurr. Still, the US health system is messed up just from how it started and how individualistic people are, which isn't always a bad thing. Part of all the absurd prices could be for recouping R&D costs. For every successful drug, there are plenty of other failed drugs and wasted money. Still, some degree of price control would be good, though I don't see how it's feasible with how many issues there are.
One of the biggest things that gets brought up is with mandatory care and people protesting about how unfair that is, but they fail to consider that letting everyone opt in whenever would mean too little money in the system for the people who are sick to use. After all, who wants to spend money on "nothing"?
The other thing is that it clearly isn't working. No insurance and you're screwed here, unless people consider going to the emergency room in the most severe cases working. In some urban areas, some people will preventative tests done and not receive the results for over half a year. A lot of the urban centers are simply too overwhelmed, but that's still pretty absurd. There are also other problems, but I think that it'd have the potential to get to ranty-like.
The way that the Obama administration introduced and handled things could definitely have been smoother, and there are still issues, but it's better than anyone else can say that they've done. I definitely agree that it seems more punishment-based. It could also fail miserably, though, which would cause it to have even less chance of success later on, which would be unfortunate. It'd also be nice to give more people a chance to improve their daily lives for something so easily taken for granted as good health.
(Despite all the complaining, though, I still have to say that living in the US is pretty great... I just don't want to think about how screwed I'd be if I ended up having severe medical issues.)