Yeah, for me the big takeaway from all I've read about health and welfare spending in the US is how private sector solutions are actually less efficient than public ones for certain services (notably, healthcare, where cost control in the US private system is insane, leading to seemingly huge spending which results in a poorer overall health outcome).
Speaking of bitching about healthcare, today I spent an hour calling different dentists and orthodontists to get my bonded retainer repaired. Damn thing needs two blobs of dental cement stuck to two teeth, plus the old glue needs to be scraped off. This is a ten minute procedure tops, and if I had a teeny mirror, a scraper and some cement I could do it myself. One wanted five hundred dollars, three wanted between one and two hundred, one said it couldn't be repaired and they'd have to replace it for three hundred dollars (sight unseen, despite the fact that I've had it repaired twice now), seven didn't have the right cement (it's standard dental cement, I asked last time I needed this done so they're just ignorant), one asked me how much I was willing to pay and then doubled that number, and one was willing to do it for seventy five dollars.* Which brings me to my major bit of bitching. I don't need health insurance half so much as I need fucking price transparency. It's not the fucking eighties, I shouldn't need to call a dozen dental offices just to get pricing for a trivial procedure. And it's utterly infuriating that this shitnozzlery is omnipresent in healthcare: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...gery-cost-somewhere-between-10000-and-125000/ If I weren't looking for something super routine that every (halfway competent) dentist is should be able to do, it'd have been virtually impossible. How the fuck am I supposed to be a responsible, price conscious consumer of medical care when doctors, hospitals and medical organizations more generally do everything they can to act like the unholy spawn of a used car salesperson and a local government functionary? Obivously I can't. Obviously I'm supposed to behave like a passive wallet. And just as obviously prices will raise while we get idiot paper after idiot paper (not including this one, which on skim looks interesting) going "lol can't figure it out, prices are going up like magic herp derp". K now I've passed my fury stones, /relurk
Dental stuff is even more f-d up than medical from what I've had to deal with. My insurance covers a decent amount of having a painful procedure to repair a screwed up tooth, but DOES NOT cover the much easier option of just ripping the damn thing out and getting a fake replacement, okay the ripping out part is covered, but not the very expensive replacement. Give me a hunk of porcelin and some cement and I'll fix it myself. Can't wait to see how much my sons stuff is going to cost next week. Maybe I can sell a kidney.
Since dental is the least-insured component it is completely hilarious that it has all the problems of the medical industry still. As a random comparision, calling around getting quotes on replacing a water heater is just as bad. The only place that's transparent in pricing is Home Depot. It's time-intensive and aggrevating to get prices out of local plumbing shops.
I have been an occasional and more or less inadvertent dental tourist—I mean, if I'm going to be in Taiwan anyway, I might as well get some fillings and a crown for 1/10 the price it would have cost me at home.
