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This explanation doesn't relate to 'a medical system that offers the same breadth and capabilities'. You refer to medical inventions/enhancements.

I have no idea how the french system is organized and what the ratio is between public and private medical institutions.


"breadth" was meant to imply how many diseases can be treated, and how many different options are available for each. "Capabilities" was the wrong word - I meant to refer to how refined each procedure is.

The R&D tie is that R&D tends increases the number of procedures or refine the ones that exist. I'm assuming that the results tend to be available locally first, and that any insurance/socialized system will be hostile towards anything expensive if there is an alternative that is "good enough" in the eyes of the bureaucrats responsible for the budget.

My question regarding France isn't public/private per se but rather how they manage to encourage so much R&D in a (presumably) socialized medical system. You wouldn't expect to see that kind of R&D effort in the socialized medical systems, but it appears France has a way around that.

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I think the reason people go to the US and/or France has more to do with the enormous private health care system in the US and the ties France still holds with a lot of developing countries.



The US sees a lot of patients from Europe and Canada too, either for procedures not available at home or when the waiting list (rationing/budgeting) is too long.

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Dunno what all the resistance is to 'socialized' medicine; maybe because I grew up north of the border. I thank fuck we have it, though. I got great (and fast) treatment when I had cancer


Yes, but the treatment, procedures used, etc, almost certainly weren't developed there. They just used the R&D results paid for elsewhere, and used drugs subsidized south of the border. You need a way to encourage R&D in a socialized system: Canada doesn't, though France apparently does.

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I know Michael Moore is a douche, but he made kind of an interesting point about how Americans don't pay private fees for police or Fire Dept. emergencies, as they are often a matter of life-and-death. He made the comparison with medical treatment.



As far as I know ambulance calls are billed throughout the US. I know that here it's about $500 per call. The big difference between hospitals and fire/police is cost: fire and police capabilities are cheap and the costs controllable, whereas medical system costs are far higher and cannot be controlled locally (by the people who fund fire/police)

(insurance pays that ambulance bill if you have it)

There has been talk in some states about charging for SAR services (search & rescue) though I don't know if it's been done or not. A SAR search triggered by a 406 beacon can be charged by law if it was a false alert but I don't think it's happened yet.
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