Time for European style socialized medine

[Tiberius]

You're absolutely right. How could I possibly claim that there are people who don't realise that they pay tax and that some of that tax goes to the NHS. That would be an incredible claim to make.

Way to miss my point...again! The people who I'm talking about do not pay tax. They are all earning less than the minimum taxable amount (so the unemployed, students, poor, etc.). For them, the NHS is completely free. They rarely stop to think about the effect it has on everyone else.

How come only one of us is allowed to argue by anecdote?

I gave you evidence in the form of the students who protested against education fee rises. A large percentage of them held signs from the socialist workers party, which demanded free education. Stands to reason they also think that the NHS should be free.

Great. OK. What if everyone decided to do the same thing? No NHS ambulances, no NHS, as nobody is paying for it from their tax. Or is this the whole, "I'm alright jack" argument, because I'd hoped that that had mostly died with Thatcherism.

There would be NHS ambulances, since they are still getting paid by the people who use them. I said before that all charges relating to your healthcare are simply sent to the insurance company, rather than to the government. So, if nobody pays for the NHS through tax, the NHS would run off the money it gets from private insurers.

A social healthcare system only works if it is social. I'm sure that you believe that your health is more important than everyone else's... but guess what? They think the same about their health. The deciding factor in triage shouldn't be wealthy-first, then the poor. Because, then we really would all be fucked.

I'm starting to think you really aren't reading my posts. I told you...twice...what happens to the poor in my scenario. They are either supported by the government (as they currently are), or by charity, or both.

Ok, I could see that happening, but it would also have to include strong anti-trust laws to prevent one company from buying out all the rest or to prevent all the companies from joining together to fuck everyone over.

The point of a free market is that if this happens, anyone can set up a competing company to challenge the might of the larger one. A free-market is entirely consumer driven, so as long as you have people such as yourself who don't like large corporations trying to gain a monopoly, you will have other companies form who will refuse to merge with those larger companies.

I can see the benefit of anti-trust laws when it comes to a finite resource, but healthcare insurance is not a finite resource, since all the services are abstract. You pay money for the insurance, which isn't a physical thing, and then when you need to use it, your insurance company pays for your hospital bills.

I don't agree with that. If my neighbor's house is on fire, I don't care whether he's insured or not; I want the fire department to put it out before it threatens my house.

This is how it works:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/...home-burn/

"Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee."

Like I said before, it's all about the risk you run. That's the point of a risk...it can go one way or the other. Sometimes a person who doesn't buy fire insurance will never have an incident. Other times, their house will catch fire 3 times in one year. I'll mention at this point that I don't agree with the fire insurance setup in the article I quoted. I think that if you don't pay the yearly fee, and your house catches on fire, you should simply be slapped with a very large bill for the service, at least large enough to convince (the majority) people that the $75 a year is worth it.

That's not true. National Insurance is just another tax. It just goes straight into the treasury and has nothing to do with the NHS. I spent 15 years working in the UK,half of that as an employer so I know all about NI thanks

Clearly you don't.

National Insurance contributions are paid into the various classes of National Insurance after deduction of monies specifically allocated to the National Health Service (NHS).

Bolding mine.