President Obama and supporters of his health care plan are pushing like crazy to get the thing passed into law. Meanwhile, most of us out here in flyover country, the people who may benefit or suffer from it but who will definitely pay for it, are wishing they would slow down a bit so we can study the whole thing some more.
It would be nice if supporters could point to a similar system somewhere in the world where it has been tried and actually works. There are people around who will attempt to tell us how great the government run programs are in Britain and Canada -- for example see previously, How bad could the Canadian healthcare system really be? However, there is certainly no shortage of complaints about those systems, and we have to conclude that no system is perfect.
Same with France. HealthcareEconomist.com says, "France has the highest level of satisfaction with their health care among all European countries." However, it didn't take Le Parisien long to find some dissatisfaction. In particular, they found doctors who won't accept patients who are under the government plan. Excerpt (translation from Google translate.):
The two-tier medicine is a reality. Victims, patients receiving universal health coverage (CMU), reserved for people earning less than € 621 per month. They have more and more difficult to seek treatment outside of hospitals. Proof: The test that we conducted among physicians Paris and its suburbs.
Thirty practitioners contacted, eight or 25% refused to grant us an appointment when it was as a patient benefiting from the CMU.
So we have an example of doctors not making enough money treating patients under the government plan, so even though the law says they have to treat them, they don't. C'est la vie.
The Obamacare plan presumably will require people to buy insurance either from a private insurer or the government. And while some of the opponents say the government may squeeze out the private insurer, it's possible the opposite could happen if the government doesn't pay doctors enough. The practical effect would be to put all those people currently without insurance right back where they started.
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