I remember a conversation about 8 years ago at COMDEX and he was talking about how much (as in quite a bit) of his salary went towards the Canadian health care system. I have no idea where he lived in Canada, but using his numbers, it would cost me a few more percentages more from my salary (about another 7% if I remember correctly) to be under the plan he was. He hated it.
Of course, I have no idea of his living situation, general health, etc. He WAS just a stranger at a tech conference.
I have heard talk from people against a government run health care, which seems to match up with some comments above this, that it drives costs down, which sounds good to the consumer, but also means that doctors get paid a lot less and thus they go elsewhere to make more money, so then you could end up with sub-par physicians, or a doctor "shortage" sometimes. Not saying that all doctors in the USofA are great, but I've heard horror stories about some in other countries. Of course, you never hear of the good ones, just the ones that make for good stories, right?
The only other issue I see with some of the "plans" being pushed by certain presidential candidates is that a couple of them also plan on including the government paid health care to people who are here illegally. So those of us "good" citizens who would be paying our taxes to get government run health care, would also have to pay taxes to cover those people who aren't paying any taxes at all. I am not talking about the poor, or unfortuntate people, but the people who are working, but since they are illegally here, they don't pay taxes. That is something like 15Million people, so it would have to have an impact on what we pay.
Oh, one other question for our Canadian friends since they have more experience with all of this.
How do you deal with some of the people in Canada who are of the "free-loader" type where they have tons of kids, don't work, and let the government pay them money so that they can live (which gets spend on smokes and booze a lot of the time) with no incentive to ever get out from government assisted programs? They don't pay hardly anything, IF anything in taxes, yet have a whole slew of kids that all need medical care.
Or is that just a problem in the USofA with our generally lazy society?
