For those of you in the EU and Australia, how does national healthcare affect your national debt? Granted this may not matter to you, but in the US, it's a source of major concern.

Most EU countries have their debts under control (there are a few (Greece for example) who are in really big trouble though), EU is not a nation and thus things like healthcare, education, taxes, debts, etc vary greatly between individual countries (both in terms of quality and how it is funded), Sweden (Where i live) has its debt under control it was dropping steadily from 1998 (69.9% of GDP) to 2012 (38.2% of GDP) our taxes are still pretty high though and our private debts are also high(mostly housing loans).

unbelievable. So if I understand:

- not urgent case - money are requested front

- urgent case, money are requested

A simple doom of us healthcare is that health assurance is voluntary, and thus to survive, hospitals ask enormous finances from those few pacients (clients rather) they take care of.

In Slovakia it works like this:

-Every person must pay health assurance fee, monthly- 70 Euro

- if person has no income (kid, unemployed, retired), state pays fee for them to the HAA

- there are multiple assurance authorities , 1 state owned, 2 private

- every licensed ordinance recieves a HA authority income every month, called "Limit"

- if ordinance goes out of the "Limit" expense per month, it has to move and delay health care for patients unless they are urgent.

You never can be charged anything if you are a HAA client

unbelievable. So if I understand:

- not urgent case - money are requested front

- urgent case, money are requested

A simple doom of us healthcare is that health assurance is voluntary, and thus to survive, hospitals ask enormous finances from those few pacients (clients rather) they take care of.

There isn't a whole lot of evidence for cost-shifting, though it is intuitive and so an attractive explanation. The "sticker prices" are ridiculously inflated and only have a casual relationship with the actual price of the inputs needed to provide medical care, and so the actual amount of the bill the hospital needs to recover to stay open is far less (and very opaque). The dirty secret of US healthcare is that most of the vital portions of unrecoverable costs get sorted out on the back end, whether via government assistance or begging for charity or whatever other scheme some administrator comes up with.

The health care system here is very extractive towards consumers and frequently drives them to seek care in the most expensive (and least healthy) ways possible. Behind the curtain, a lot of these costs get socialized anyways. Now that health insurance is no longer strictly voluntary, we'll see if the pattern holds. I'm not expecting any amazing shifts though, and certainly not in the near term.

So without wishing to derail the conversation too far*, apparently the healthcare.gov system is comprised of 500 million lines of code. Yes, loc is a terrible metric to measure software complexity, but still, that's a really big number.

Frankly, I am highly skeptical, especially given the source is

According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size.

Anyone else believe this?

*mods, I'm happy to make a new topic if you prefer.

Seems legit to me.

186 million lines of code for business logic.

314 million lines of code (hardcoded data: one line per US citizen).

The impression I've got from snippets of world news is that the republicans fought tooth and nail to block these reforms at all, so the eventual compromise in the end is basically "business as usual".

A big part of the problem imo is how vast the bill is. A lot of the reforms would have passed bipartisan easily, but they were attached to huge sticking points that would never pass with bipartisan support. Generally people like to ignore the problems with the bill under the excuse of, "...but healthcare is better than no healthcare!" and that's the kind of thinking that ends up 10 years later with you wondering why politicians were so stupid to pass a bill that essentially makes health insurance companies both incredibly powerful and on a crash course for drastic change or failure.

The simple answer to why things like the ACA are generally bad is because a 'mostly good' philosophy is not a good philosophy for legislating.

edit: And personally I would prefer most of the things offerred by the ACA to be handled at the state level. I am not a fan of how much responsibility we give the federal government instead of the state government. If a state government has a failure you can usually fix it in weeks/months and if it's really bad you can move. If a federal government has a failure the fixes usually take months/years and it's not nearly as easy to relocate to a new country as to a new county.

The effective outcome is a means to prop up insurance companies and then mandate their use. If you grant those two stipulations then the forthcoming results are common sense. :)

The effective outcome is a means to prop up insurance companies and then mandate their use. If you grant those two stipulations then the forthcoming results are common sense.

Sweet Flashback Jeebus!

Where in the world of capitalism have you been?!

IMO the healthcare problems of the US go far deeper than either government or the free market can address -- profiteering and price-gouging at all levels, insane malpractice insurance premiums due to too low a bar required to sue for malpractice combined with a get-rich-by-lawsuit culture, the general reluctance of people to seek preventative care or regular health checkups. I could go on, but the point is that current legislation does nothing--and could feasibly do very little if it weren't as screwy as it was--about any of the underlying problems.

I don't know what the solution is, but it wasn't to continue the status quo, nor is it the affordable care act. As I understand it, the reforms of the insurance industry sound big, and certainly will change the way they operate, but are essentially token compromises in the face of the massive win-fall that is forcing everyone (especially the young and healthy) into their pool. Now, I'm not saying it'd be fair for young people to only start paying into insurance when they start to trend towards becoming old and decrepit, secure they can't be turned away, but I doubt if anyone here is seriously considering what this actually means for young people -- most with no college education or crippling college debt, low employment prospects and where those employers who are hiring are avoiding full-time employees to lessen their own healthcare burden. That's the time of life when most people are establishing their financial lives, and now they have to support this other significant cost where before it was a reasonable, if risky, choice to skip health insurance while they don't really need it. As a result, they'll carry their school debts longer, remain tenants instead of home-owners, and have no choice than to rely on credit to make large but necessary purchases (like, say, a car), all while working 30 hours a week at minimum wage for many of them. These new costs aren't the only straw that will break the camel's back, but its certainly one of the larger ones.

Unfotunately I don't believe our leaders are capable of even seeing our actual problems for what they are, much less sizing them up, and much less again delivering real solutions. Red/Blue politics as usual, unfettered lobbying by corporations, industry and the mega-rich, nepotism/chroneyism, a lack of accountability and unrestricted term limits for representatives and senators virtually ensure the system as a whole will continue to serve business and political interest rather than the people until either it all collapses under the weight of their greed, or the people get truly sick of it and force change from the ground up--but of course for that to happen we'd need to overcome our collective slumber, apathy, and not turn away from the difficult work of real change (not Obama-style "don't worry, it'll all be fine." real change).