You might want to actually find out what the average income tax expenditure is from people living in countries with/without universal healthcare before continuing that thought. I can offer my current experiences:

UK income tax (with full UH)
22% from £2,231-£34,600
40% over..

Ireland income tax (without full UH)
20% on the first €36,400
41% over..

Ireland is currently listed in wikipedia as having universal healthcare. Seemingly it was legislated in 2004 and begun in 2005, but hasn’t been effected yet.

We do have a ‘medical card’ for social-welfare recipients, retirees and long-term-ill, but the rest still have to pay for GP visits, operations, drugs etc. We certainly don’t pay as much as the US for any of it, though.

No, I believe the prices quoted are before insurance reimbursements. Not all systems are like the UK’s or Canada’s, where the state pays doctors directly. In fact, most are not.

Here when I go to the doc (GP) I pay €22, he swipes my insurance smart card; then a few days later €15 is wired to my account automagically (no paperwork), and a few days later still, my complementary insurance pays me €6 back.

He hands me a prescription, which I give to the pharmacist, who then swipes my card and gives me the meds. He gets the amount wired automatically, from both the public insurance and the complementary insurance. Again, no paperwork. But they’re private businesses, it’s just that transactions are handled electronically.

All other points asside, I’d rather my tax money be spent on making people healthy than making them dead in a foreign country or harassing random folks in airports.

Let’s be real.»

Let’s get real, indeed. Medical school is free in many countries (it is here), and humongous malpractice damages are very much a US only thing as well — and an exagerated problem at that (it’s been estimated to contribute to less than 1% of the overall US healthcare cost).

Oh geez, not that crap again.

Here’s the thing. Guess what’s unique to the US wrt healthcare?

Lack of universal coverage. True, but what else?

Mostly unregulated predatory private insurers. True, but what else?

Huge malpractice settlements? True, but .. what else?

Let me tell you what’s unique to the US: nowhere else in the world will you see the constant barrage of prescription med advertising you get there. In most countries, those severely constrained, if not forbidden entirely. It’s even completely alien to us, to the point that we are extremely surprised when we see US television.

Here’s how you get an instant 33% discount on drug prices — forbid advertising to the general public for prescription drugs. There. Boom. Instant saving.

Patients shouldn’t ask their docs for drugs. Doctors should decide what’s best for them. It’s their god damn job. Not only are ads expensive, they also encourage overconsumption.

Thank you US. All the rest of the World thanks you for your generosity with all of us.

Recap: U.S. market requires billions spent on marketing, leading to higher cost, requiring high drug prices.
Other countries restrict marketing opportunities, leading to less cost, leading to the ability to have lower drug prices with less R&D.

There is also the argument that lower cost drugs would allow for widespread international consumption of drugs, leading to a diffusion of income but a net gain in profit.

We have a drug buying agency here called Pharmac which is separate from the government and is responsible for buying all publicly funded medications in NZ (pubicly funded medication costs $4 a prescription here, the rest is subsidised by the govt). Pharmac buy generic drugs, where ever possible, and they buy in bulk (if you can call a county of 4 million people a bulk order). Drugs are therefore cheaper then buying name brands. Maybe this has something to do with the lower medication costs here.

See the book “The Truth About Drug Companies…” by Marcia Angell, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

And let’s not start on the specialists…

Remember, insurance companies manage about 6% profit margin. That’s not exactly draining the blood of their customers for massive profits.

Citation?

Also, let’s can it with the “For-Profit companies screwing us” line. There are plenty of not for profit and non-profit healthcare co-ops and insurance providers. My former employer, the 8th largest one, is non-profit. And the costs were still very high. They wished the could market in surrounding states, but the cost of doing business across state lines was ridiculous due to Federal and State legislation. That further compounds the differences between a single-entity system and our fractured system because it isn’t Private vs Public, it’s Fractured with Regulation vs The Regulator as The Only Buyer.

The absolute HIGHEST federal income tax bracket in Canada is 29% for crying out loud. And there isn’t a province in the nation with a 20% plus provincial income tax bracket. Not anywhere.

You are here posting this on the internet. I thus assume you have access to Google or some other search engine. Did it never occur to you, before posting, to possibly try going there and typing in soimething like “Canadian income tax rates”? 5 minutes of your time to avoid making a fool of yourself seems like a reasonable investment.

And that aside, how the hell do you go from the information presented here, which is that health care services COST LESS in other nations, and leap from that to the conclusion that therefore their taxes must be completely out of control! Yes, that makes perfect sense.

In reality, average Canadian marginal tax rates are in fact a measly couple percent higher than in the US, but not because of those *lower* health care costs, obviously. The taxes are higher for other social services… oh, and that federal budget SURPLUS Canada was running for 12 straight years before the recent global recession while they paid down their national debt… unlike a certain nation to the south of them with half the electorate and a certain political party that was screaming and crying and stamping their feet for ever-lower taxes even while their national debt spiraled out of control.

Drug advertising is mostly banned in other nations because of this and because they believe it’s wrong for commercials to influence the decisions doctors and patients make.

The pharmaceutical companies actually now spend more on advertising than the do on research and development.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.htm

Had $230 billion in sales revenues

Spent $73 billion on marketing and administration
Spent $37 billion on research & development

Retained $49 billion in profits

In that year, 93 new drugs were approved; of those, only 6 were improvements. All the rest were “me-too” drugs—i.e., trivial variations of already-existing drugs, not innovations.

See sources in the short (2:45) video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouF3ISihHLM

In fact, doctors in spain have not free education, but education here is far cheap than in the US. The best universities are the public ones, and the yearly cost of attending one vary between 500 and 1000 euros, depending on the carrer you choose and your previous years grades). So a medicine title here could cost you around 5000 euros (around 7000 US$, I think).

And maybe I’m wrong, but I think doctors don’t need insurance here. It’s not a common thing to be dennunced for malpractice, and I think goverment probably pay the cost in that case. You know, they are public servants.

By the way, the “rental cost” of medical facilities is 0, since they are goberment buildings, public owned.

Oh, and I think the monthly salary of a just-out-of-faculty doctor is around 2500 euros. If you take 4 weeks, with 40 working hours each, they get paid 15 €/hour, around 20 US$, so 15 US$ for each visit are more than enough, in fact.

At least in Spain, pocket expense when you attend to a doctor is 0, always.

Now take a majority of doctor’s offices I’ve been in over my 37 years of existence – all but one doctor so far has behaved like an assembly line – they get as many people in the door and back out as quickly as possible to collect as much insurance money and co-pays as possible. They act put out if they have to spend more than 5 minutes discussing anything with their patients. Does anyone stop to think it is because the insurance companies are colluding with them and that something should be done? I’m all for a government based system here in the US if it dismantles this buddy system between health care providers and insurers. I believe the amount I pay in increased taxes would be much less than what I am paying per month for my premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and meds without much doubt, not to mention what my employer pays per employee to the insurance company.

On page 29 it has the contact information of the CE of the group, so you can always email him with questions.