> I have no idea where this meme that free market health care looks like the US comes from.
India shouldn't be in a Canadian's comparison set with respect to health care systems. The resource differences are too great to learn anything useful about the impact of other dimensions. Can you name a developed country with a health care system as or more free market than the American one?
As for your experience in India... Consider how much wealthier you are than the average Indian. If you were that much wealthier than the average American, do you really think you'd have any complaints about the American health care system? Conversely, what do you think your experience would have been if your wealth relative to the average American has instead been your wealth relative to the average Indian?
My surgery cost me roughly 1-3 months of a typical Indian software engineer's salary. If my relative wealth had been the same it would have been a very good experience.
In contrast, there was a recent NYT article about a person in the US who underwent a similar surgery. A single billing discrepancy (to say nothing about the entire bill) is comparable to a software engineer's yearly salary.
Furthermore, the experience was easy, with none of the nonsense I deal with in the US. When I got to India, my initial medical exam cost roughly the same as a dinner at a decent restaurant. An MRI cost me the same as an expensive night out. I was given a price quote for the treatment and the total cost (including incidentals) was within 2-3% of the quote. The only person who even tried to rip me off during the process was the auto rickshaw driver who took me home.
Certainly the bill would have hurt me more if I were a typical Indian. But the experience I'm describing is not the wealth gap. I know people who are "that much wealthier" than the average American and they do have lots of complaints about the US system.
India shouldn't be in a Canadian's comparison set with respect to health care systems. The resource differences are too great to learn anything useful about the impact of other dimensions. Can you name a developed country with a health care system as or more free market than the American one?
As for your experience in India... Consider how much wealthier you are than the average Indian. If you were that much wealthier than the average American, do you really think you'd have any complaints about the American health care system? Conversely, what do you think your experience would have been if your wealth relative to the average American has instead been your wealth relative to the average Indian?