Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "The Budget." video.

  1.  @basillah7650  shockingly enough, a single payer, government run system actually results in the medicines costing less in the first place than they would otherwise... and then the tax payer covers a decent chunk of that reduced price, yes... of course, the specifics of the systems vary from place to place, but in most of them you either don't need health insurance on top of your taxes, or it's quite a bit cheaper and pays out a LOT more reliably than in the USA, and either way it's not tied to your Job, so you can, if need be, quit without losing your coveage (though, of course, you may eventually run into problems paying your premiums, depending on exactly how that works where you are). Amusing quirk of the US health system: half the reason so many things cost so much is that the insurance companies screw over the health care providers just as much as they do they customers, so the health care providers jack up the prices so that the times they can manage to nail the insurers to the wall and get them to actually pay up cover all the times said insurers just flat out refuse to pay even when they absolutely should. ... yeah, if the insurance companies weren't such scum bags many parts of the American health care system would be Cheaper... on paper. In practice it wouldn't actually be that much cheaper most of the time because the insurance companies would actually be paying 4 times instead of paying 4 times as much once (which might affect the polices and payments of individual customers in some fashion). Oh, and apparently quite a few places, in at least some parts of the USA, will actually give you a discount down to something much closer to what the particular service they provide Should cost if you pay them directly, without involving the insurance companies (and presumably before you leave the premesis), because they don't have to deal with that whole mess. ... of course, for larger and more expensive matters that's not much help, but for the lower end of things it can be a big deal.
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  2. I'll give you good odds plenty of stuff will change... it'll just mostly be behind the scenes stuff that you'll see little or no direct effect from unless you happen to be part of the specific target demographic for that particular change, and any indirect effect will take years to propagate through the system. That's usually how such things go. By which point odds are good that Australia will have managed to elect a right-of-centre government who will have set half of it on fire again (the effects of breaking things tends to propagate faster than the effects of fixing them).
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