>>>>There are other things that drive costs up significantly which have lead that the average American pays twice or triple as much than in other countries for only mediocre quality of healthcare.
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>>Youch. ;-) Actually the quality of care for Mr Average USA is pretty good... not that I dare post reasons why the US keeps coming bottom in the Commonwealth reviews in case those points become sound bites. ;-)
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>I am certainly not a physician, but I think I know enough to evaluate these reports/surveys on which countries are at the top and which at the bottom, and what indicators they are talking about. Sort of lost in the conversation is that the actual direct patient care (i.e. quality of the doctor) is still rated very high in this country.
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>You won't have to twist my arm to acknowledge that the health care system in the U.S. needed some serious re-work. And I've said all along that there's one thing in the AHCA that I generally agree with - coverage of pre-existing conditions. The ills of the system could have been dealt with through targeted legislation and I'm sure there could have been scenarios where the majority of licensed physicians would have agreed. However, right now, every survey of physicians shows the majority don't agree with AHCA. It is inconceivable that anyone can hold AHCA as a standard of value when the majority of physicians have strong opinions against it.
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>I'll put my purely pragmatic hat on and toss my libertarian views aside for a moment - one might make an argument that the AHCA "might" have been received better, were the U.S. economy not going through a five year period of recession/extremely slow recovery. With a poor labor participation rate and with other weak indicators, it was the WORST time for something like AHCA. There were politicians who honestly thought Americans would be gullible enough to believe that AHCA would be an economic stimulus. It's safe to say that anyone who still believes that today is dumber than a bag of hammers.

Make that six years. The economic funk started with the market crash in 2008.

I for one never believed the AHCA/ACA would be an economic stimulus. It was intended to fix a broken system. When you are spending way more of GDP on health care than other developed nations, yet receiving below average health care, it was way past time to try something different.