Speaker 1: Let's go next to. I hope I pronounce this correctly.
Is it okay? Oh, no, no, no, no. This person is actually just listening. Sorry, sorry,
sorry. They don't want to be called on. That would have been a very, very big mistake. Let's go next
to Pim. This from Chicago. Pim, welcome. Speaker 3: Hi, David. Can you hear me?
Speaker 1: Yes, I can. Speaker 3: How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing well. Speaker 6: So I had a question on health care,
too. Like, I recently broke a vertebrae in my back, so I'm just dealing with all of the
bills from the hospital and doctors and all these different places.
Speaker 1: I'm really sorry to hear that. How did that happen?
Speaker 6: I don't know. I just bent over and like I thought I pulled something in my back and but
so we went to the I ended up being so painful I couldn't
get up or anything. Sorry to call an ambulance. Anyways,
the doctor was like, you probably fell within the last month or so. And then,
I don't know, bending over like, you know, maybe had a hairline fracture moving over, just kind of
did the deal. But that's terrible. Yeah, it's honestly it's I've broken other bones and it was
the most painful initially, but the recovery has been the fastest out of all the. Okay, so broken.
Speaker 1: Well good. Speaker 6: But yeah. So
anyways I'm just, you know, dealing with all of the bills from everything and my dad is actually
was born in France and my both of my grandparents still live there. And his main argument against
universal health care is that the care that his parents receive in France is not really ideal.
He seems to think that I don't know, doctors aren't paid as much there, so they're not as
motivated to provide quality care. So I'm just curious if you have any ideas of how it could
maybe dispel that notion to him that, well. Speaker 1: Listen, this is a very complicated
issue. You know, I, I can't say that much about French doctors, but I know
British doctors and they are not paid as much. That is absolutely true. Now,
whether a British doctor will provide inferior care because an American doctor makes more money,
that also doesn't really make sense. I mean, if you're British and you work in the UK and
these are the salaries, I don't know that the fact that some doctor in New York City is getting more
money is going to make you provide inferior care. That I'm not sure about. But I think
one of the things I would like to see the left do. Is to acknowledge that many countries that
might have better systems than the ones that we do. They don't necessarily have perfect systems.
And you have to imagine a triangle with three, you know, like it's a triangle. It has three points
where there are these three elements, you've got cost, quality and access, and every system
is trying to make a dot somewhere between those three. If you go lower cost and higher access,
that puts downward pressure on quality, all else being equal. If you have higher cost and higher
quality, then you're pulling away from everybody having access and every system is basically trying
to find a point on that triangle. And the French system is not perfect. I talked about
the German system before. We've talked about the system in Singapore. There's no perfect
system. The point is, do we want to prioritize quality? And in quality I include the time you
have to wait until you get treatment. Do we want to prioritize quality and or cost
and or access? And many countries do better than us on any of those three or even two of those.
And then when you say, Well, which countries do better on all three, then it becomes a question of
for what part of the population. And I don't know that, you know, I don't know enough about
the French system to say specifically, but it is not a shock to me that no system is
perfect. We've known that for a long time. Speaker 6: Do you have, like a system that
you think like a certain part of the world that we should.
Speaker 3: Shoot for you. Just want to be able to give him a game sample.
Speaker 1: The best thing. This is so. So everybody loves to just say. Single payer.
Boom. That's it. It's over. I've seen very good results with systems that are a combination of
nonprofit, potentially through employer, or maybe not. Maybe it's just employer subsidized,
but it's nonprofit and federally administered with the option to buy up or buy into a private system,
if you so please, with a safety net system where if you just can't afford it, you also you get
care anyway, which some states in the United States sort of have. And if I recall correctly,
I believe the German system is sort of like that. But I'd have to re-up my scholarship on the issue.
I've read a bunch of books about it, but it's been five years and so it may not be accurate to say
that it's the German system that I'm thinking of. Speaker 6: Gotcha. Well, thank you so much, David.
Speaker 1: My pleasure. Absolutely. Great to hear from you