Is it true that medical care is completely free?

Not really, there is no such thing as free medical insurance.

Free healthcare

First of all, the so-called "free healthcare for all" does not mean that no one pays for healthcare, but it means that the government or the health insurance organization pays for most or even all of the medical expenses, and the patient doesn't pay for it, or only pays a little bit of the medical expenses symbolically.

Secondly, "free medical care for all" does not mean that it is completely free, nor does it mean that it is entirely borne by the public purse, but rather that it is a kind of universal medical insurance system that provides a higher level of protection and a very low proportion of individual payments. The specific proposal is to rely on the existing medical insurance system, the coordinated use of medical insurance funds and financial resources, the use of "basic medical insurance first payment + financial underwriting" model, *** with the sharing of medical costs.

Then, from abroad, there are two modes of free medical care, one is North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and other planned economy countries, the state-run hospitals, hospitals are a functional department of the government, fully supported by the state financial support, is responsible only for free to the patient to see the doctor, the medical behavior of the economic calculations do not exist at all.

The other is a market economy, individuals see a high degree of free or full free of charge, from different sources of funding, can be divided into three types. The first: the national (government) health care model, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia and other countries, health care as a social welfare provided to the whole population, financed through high taxes. The second type: the social insurance model, in countries such as Germany and Japan, where contributions are made by both employers and employees (workplaces and individuals), subsidized by the government, and shared by the whole society***. The third: commercial insurance model, represented by the United States, the main body is pure commercial insurance model, special groups (old, disabled and poor) enjoy free medical insurance policy.

In short, there is no such thing as free medical care in the world. The so-called "free medical care for all" is in fact still the people's own money to pay for their own medical care, but the people pay the money in advance to the government finance department or the health insurance department in the form of taxes or premiums, and then return to the medical institutions after a round of transfer.

Second, the pain points of free health care

1. According to statistics, Canadians have to wait for more than ten weeks on average to get medical treatment, and the patients with the longest waiting time have to wait for more than 10 months before they can see a patient, and many of the patients haven't waited for the doctors to treat them, and either slowly recovered by themselves or their condition deteriorated to a level that can't be saved. So it's almost inevitable that a patient's condition will be delayed, depending on the extent of the delay.

2. At the same time, free healthcare can lead to higher healthcare costs. In the UK, for example, private clinics provide 86% of healthcare services for 10% of the cost of healthcare, while public hospitals provide only 14% of healthcare services for 90% of the cost of healthcare. Compared with private clinics, public hospitals in the United Kingdom have two obvious drawbacks: First, inefficiency, the waiting time for patients to be admitted to hospitals remains high, which is as short as more than a month, or as long as several months or even a year; second, serious wastage, as there is no relationship between the incomes of medical staff in public hospitals and the revenues and expenditures of the hospitals, so there is no benefit in economizing, and there is no responsibility for wastage, which has led to the abovementioned situation of public hospitals consuming 90% of the health care expenditure but providing only 14% of the health care services. 14% of medical services.

3. In addition, in countries such as India and Russia, there are two models of health care at the same time, public hospitals are free to visit and private hospitals are not free to visit. As public hospitals do not earn money, they do not have sufficient funds to buy advanced medical equipment and cannot afford to hire doctors with high skills, resulting in a very limited level of public hospitals, which can only treat headache and fever. At the same time, public hospitals are also facing staff wastage, with many doctors going to private hospitals which offer good salaries. In the end, people have to pay to go to private hospitals for serious illnesses, and the so-called free health care is in name only.