The current way the United States does its healthcare has some problems. It does not need to have these problems because like Dr. Flynn said, other countries do their healthcare in different ways and it works better. Singapore does their healthcare like a free market, so you can look around at different doctors for what you need and choose the one you like, based on prices or anything else. Because there is competition in this system, the prices of surgeries or anything else is not too high because then no one would go to you for what they need. He said that an open heart surgery in the United States could cost about $130,000 dollars while in Singapore it costs about $18,000 and so it is much easier to pay off. They also have the best safety net in Singapore because if you can’t pay for the surgery and need the government to help out, they only need to pay 18,000 dollars instead of 130,000 dollars. In Singapore they have everyone put money into mandatory savings early on for retirement and health problems. They are generally healthy so they do not have to spend a lot of money on health problems, saving more for when they do start to deteriorate as they age. If you need a surgery or something, there is a menu of options so you can choose what you want, so the prices of everything are already set so you know what you are going to pay for what you are getting. This leads to high quality and low prices because of the competition. There still needs to be a safety net in case people can’t pay for it. They do this with mandatory health insurance you have to pay, but it is very cheap because the costs are low. Also the first $2000 spent are out of your own savings so you have incentive to shop around and find the best price. If you need to spend over 2000 dollars for health expenses then most of it is covered by the insurance. Singapore also put a bunch of money into a trust fund that is distributed to hospitals, so if something really bad happens and you spend all of your health money, then you can fill out a form to apply for a grant to get some of that money to help with the medical issues.
The way it is in the United States is there is a third party to pay the second party for the services to the first party. The United States is the only country that does healthcare this way. In this system, the doctors might not be as responsive to the patients needs because they are not the one paying them, the insurance company is paying them. If the doctor treats the patient poorly, they keep getting paid by the insurance company. This happened because of the war. People were getting paid, but there was nothing to buy because everything was being put towards the war and the few stuff you could buy was expensive. To stop the praises from getting too high, the government used wage control. To prevent the other problems, the government enacted a policy, which as a side effect made the current healthcare system. They asked a businessman who had a business building boats to build liberty boats. His problem was having enough workers where his factories were. He needed to get workers to move from the east coast to the west coast where his factories were. Because of the wage control, he could not offer higher wages to the workers to get them to move. So he offered free healthcare to the ship building workers to get them to move to the west coast to build his boats. Then Ford and the other companies that were building things for the war needed the workers to stay so they started offering free healthcare. After the war, all the major companies were offering free healthcare and they just kept doing it because it was a low cost benefit even after they could raise wages again. The system got locked in because the government added a tax carve out for health insurance. Because of this the third party paying system of healthcare got locked into place in the United States.
