>The number of people who die due to lack of healthcare is ZERO for countries that have universal healthcare.
The design of any health care system needs to acknowledge the fact that people are going to get sick and die even with an unlimited budget, and there is not an unlimited budget.
We can't all get billionaire treatment for our ailments, no matter what system we have in place. We should be adults and accept that
In universal healthcare systems, the government negotiates prices of treatments and drugs -- so there are very few treatments that cost so much that you can't be covered by public (or private) insurance.
Obviously people will still get sick and die, that's unfortunately part of the human condition. But I reject the argument that life-saving treatments being impossible to afford by ordinary people is something we should accept.
I didn't mean to make the case that we should forget about the whole thing because we're all going to die anyways.
It's just that in this whole debate it seems we never have the honest discussion about how to deploy limited resources - i.e. how to ration care under a socialized system, or how to subsidize care under a free market system.
I believe that if we discussed it from this perspective perhaps the two sides of this debate could find some common ground.
That is a conversation worth having, though I hasten to note that the "limited resources" discussion (assuming you're talking about money) only ever turns up when talking about progressive policies such as universal healthcare or free college.
It's curious that nobody ever complains about limited resources when discussing increasing the military budget or "corporate welfare" through tax breaks and bank bail-outs. It leads me to wonder whether it's actually a significant problem in the first place or if it's just another talking point (there is quite a bit of evidence that deficit-spending is not necessarily a bad thing in-of-itself, what matters is what that money is being spent on).
The design of any health care system needs to acknowledge the fact that people are going to get sick and die even with an unlimited budget, and there is not an unlimited budget.
We can't all get billionaire treatment for our ailments, no matter what system we have in place. We should be adults and accept that