 So a couple of years ago on the program, we reacted to a video about British people who were told the cost and prices of prescription drugs and medical procedures in the United States and their reactions. It was just it was really entertaining to see because they were genuinely shocked that the American health care system is so terrible and that we tolerate this most of all, right? Because in in the UK you have a national health system I mean, it really is ideal. That's exactly what I want. Having said that though there's a new video by the New York Times where they show more non-Americans details and statistics about our health care system here in America and their reactions are just priceless. Enjoy. If health care is a constitutional right, then that's a form of communism because no country could afford those payments without seizing the assets of everybody else. Welcome to Finland! Oh! Dudes, what's going on? It's making me so mad! I mean, come on guys, it's it's not that hard. Look around the world. Everyone else seems to have figured it out, right? Imagine you're in America. Which of these options would be best for you? Hmm, that's a Yeah, that's that's a lot to think about. What is it? An Oop Max? I guess with what I got here, I would go with Plan D because the deductible is zero. Okay, there's there's more. Gold, HMO, PPO, PPO, HMO. What are co-pays? I don't... That's like if you pay for Spotify premium and Spotify still makes you pay every time you listen to a song. It's too complicated. I've lost, I'm so lost. In Canada, I don't have to really think about the different plans that I could pick from. You just pay one amount per month and all the major treatments are covered. At least 70% of our medical expenses are always covered. Uninsured, unable to afford treatment for a tooth infection. It keeps flaring up. Cook Emma Rittner lost her job in March. I did manage to get antibiotics from a friend whose mom regularly goes down to Mexico and I've been taking that self-medicating based off of doctor... Dr. Google's advice. Here in Japan, even if you lose a job, you would never lose your health insurance. When you lose your job, that's when society should help you. I've chosen a creative job and had the backing of a healthcare system, but if you don't have that, do you pick the safe job or do you pick the creative job? The average price per unit for insulin in 2018. Germany, $11. Canada's $12. Wow. It's like eight times the price of insulin in Canada. I guess that explains why Americans come up to Canada to buy medication. Sorry, I'm sorry, hold on. So the FDA doesn't have any authority over the prices? We have also privatized health insurance companies in Germany, but the prices are regulated by the government. The government negotiates the prices and fixes that price for two years. In Singapore, they regulate the stuff to keep the prices down and, you know, avoid sh** like this happening. Right, so I'm looking at an American medical bill. Why is it so expensive? $428,000 for rooms and such empty spaces. What? It's cheaper to go to a hotel than this one. Skin to skin after a C-section is $39. I had to pay $39.35 to hold my baby after he was born. You need to pay money to hold a baby? My brother Jamie, who's in a lot of our videos, was pretty badly injured. He's going to lose a couple fingers. If you can give $1 or if you can give $5, every little bit will help him and his family. That's heartbreaking. GoFundMe should not be something that people have to resort to to pay for their medical bills. So in America, people spend more than twice as much as in Japan for healthcare. You know, if I paid twice the amount for a car, I would want the car to be twice as good. So what's the life expectancy in the US? Why is it less? The US should be on top of both of those lists. Like, if you're charging your citizens that much money, then they better be living the longest lives. It doesn't make sense. When Alec turned 26, he was no longer allowed on his mother's insurance plan. Instead, he decided to pay for his insulin over the counter at list price. But the pharmacist told him a month's supply would be $1,300. He left empty-handed. Alec's official cause of death was diabetic ketoacidosis. A couple of years ago, I developed a heart condition and I had to have my heart restarted three times. After the third time I had it restarted, the doctor suggested I get heart surgery. When I was 13, I started to get sick and really, really sick. I was then very quickly admitted into hospital where after three weeks, I had treatment for a brain virus. The cost of the operation, I think, is about $60,000. And then the next day, when I left the hospital and I got my bill, it was a bill for parking. It was about $30. I was treated by royal doctors, had several MRIs, number punctures, all for free. So I was pretty happy that I lived in Canada and had universal health care. I couldn't have survived if I was in America. To know that I can get sick, I can get injured, but I will still be taken care of. That is freedom. This is not freedom. I really loved the reaction to Bill O'Reilly saying that if health care was a constitutional right, that would be tantamount to communism. Because you could just see how shocked they are with that level of stupidity, but it's honestly worse than that because I don't know about you folks, but I know people who thought that the Affordable Care Act was communism. Literally, conservatives have made this argument. The ACA is communism. Let me remind you, the ACA is a plan that hinges entirely on private insurance. And the role of the government is to basically just pump millions and millions and millions of dollars into the system to subsidize the cost of existing plans. But I mean, long term, as we've all seen in practice, it doesn't work out. The Affordable Care Act failed because what's affordable is subjective. But really, there shouldn't be a cost associated with health care when it comes to the point of service, right? Because so long as there's a cost, it's going to be prohibitive. And what we should care about is people getting health care. It shouldn't be commodified. We shouldn't worry about whether or not somebody has the money to pay. We should just worry that they receive that care. It's a basic service that government should provide. I mean, we expect the government to provide us with roads. We expect the government to pay for a fire department to come out to our houses if we need them. There's a lot of things that the government does. But for some reason in the United States, health care isn't one of the expectations that we have for government. We've just culturally accepted this. And thankfully, the tide is turning here, but not fast enough. So, yeah. So I like how when they were looking at the plans, one of the guys said, what are co-pays? That's like if you pay for Spotify Premium and Spotify still makes you pay every time you listen to a song. Exactly. And that seems like an oversimplification, but that's exactly it. Why am I paying every single month a gigantic premium? I think between me and my husband, it's like $14, $1500. I don't even know how much our deductible is. It's super high. But if we're already paying money every single month, and furthermore, a lot of us don't even use the health care, especially for young, why do we have to pay for co-pays? And, you know, I thought that I was getting a bargain because when I actually finally got insurance under the Affordable Care Act, I signed up for the cheapest shitty bronze plan, which is still expensive. And I went to a doctor and I didn't have a copay. So I thought, oh my god, this must be a really great plan, even though it's bronze. Come to find out, I get a bill a couple of weeks later in the mail. So the copay actually would have been preferable than the hundreds of dollars. Our system is a joke. It's an absolute joke, but yet conservatives in both parties in the United States prop it up as like being one of the best in the world. But this video debunks that as well. I love how shocked they were. One person said, you need to pay money to hold a baby. That was the cost of $39 for skin-to-skin contact. Yeah, they nickel and dime you in every way they conceivably can. And anyone who's ever received health care in the United States can attest to this. Every single American has a story about how shitty the American health care system is. And when they showed the price of drugs, you know, the United States in comparison with other developed countries, it's shocking how much more we pay. I mean, I have a nephew who needs insulin. He needs this to survive. And just the worry that he can't afford it and that my sister can't provide the insulin that he needs, that in and of itself is so immoral. A society that allows something like this to go on. Somebody in America in the richest country on earth having to worry that they won't be able to, you know, afford their life-saving insulin, it shouldn't happen. It shouldn't happen. But the fact that it does, it really speaks to where our priorities lie as a nation. They brought up the GoFundMe's. Every single person knows firsthand that there's someone in their lives that needed a GoFundMe. If I'm paying twice as much for a car, it better be twice as good. And that comments that out to me because that's such a great point. It's simple, but it really is punchy. It's concise. It's exactly what I think Americans need to hear. We pay so much more than other countries, but our outcomes are worse. Our life expectancy is lower. Honestly, to me, I find it so hard to believe that every single American isn't just furious all the time thinking about our health care system. I mean, I talked last year on the program about how months and months and months after my dad passed away, my mom was still receiving medical bills from my dad. It's bad enough that she was grieving during a pandemic, couldn't be with her loved ones because, you know, COVID-19. But on top of that, on top of all the bad things, she still received these bills from my dad, who died a long time ago now, for thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars. It's so disgusting. So then you add on top of the grief, this fear, oh my God, am I going to go bankrupt? Am I going to afford this? Do I actually have to pay for this? Is this just a statement from the insurance company? Are they going to cover it because nothing is clear in our health care system? You just don't know, right? Sometimes you get bills and you don't actually have to pay them. It's just like an atomized receipt. Sometimes you do. So, you know, you get confused. You get fearful of what's going to happen. Is your livelihood going to be affected if you can't pay tens of thousands of dollars? Because, of course, the normal human being in this country can't. It's just, it's awful. Now, the Canadian at the end, he said, he had a procedure. It cost $60,000 and all he paid was $30 for parking. I can't even imagine what that would be like. I honestly can't fathom it. I cannot fathom it. And look, all of this, in some, I think this is pretty obvious, but I think it's obvious why the health insurance industry, along with their shills in Congress and on mainstream media, are fighting so hard against Medicare for All. Because if we actually got Medicare for All codified into law, if they try to take this away from us, like, let's say, hypothetically speaking, we elected a progressive as president, and it actually passed. By some miracle, it passed. And then the next Republican administration threatened to repeal it or chip away at it, there would be riots in the streets. You can't take something like that away from people, which is why even in the UK and in Canada, the Conservative Party in Canada, the Tories in the UK, they can't just outright run on getting rid of their public health systems. They can't do that because it'd be too unpopular. You can't take that away from someone once you give that to them. So what they do is they try to covertly undermine the system by partially privatizing it and chipping away at it slowly but surely over the course of decades. And, you know, that's still bad, that's still terrible, but they still have to pay fealty to the fact that they support the national health system in the UK. Conservatives in Canada still have to say, yeah, I support our system, our single-payer system. Of course, I don't want an American system, and some of them do because they're sellouts, they're corrupt, but you're never going to hear them say that because they know how unpopular it would be. And to give you an example of another policy like that is Social Security. How many times have we seen members of both parties try to either fully privatize it or partially privatize it and immediately they face swift and severe backlash like that? It's because if you put something into the hands of the American people and they love it, you cannot take that away. And if you try, there's going to be hell to pay. So that's why they're fighting so hard against Medicare for All and even if it's really demoralizing, even if it's really frustrating to know that people are dying every single year that we don't have Medicare for All, I do understand in the back of my mind, I'm trying to remind myself that this is evidence that we're winning and we're scaring them. If they were just ignoring us, if they weren't dispatching hundreds of lobbyists to convince politicians to not support single-payer, then that'd show how ineffectual we were, how we lacked the persuasiveness needed to actually sell it, but we've sold it. The majority of Americans now support Medicare for All and depending on the poll, Republicans support it too. So I mean, we are winning in terms of convincing Americans. Now it's just a matter of actually getting it codified into law. And once we do that, it'll immediately transition into a fight to preserve what we've managed to accomplish because like, you know, the UK and Canada, you know, there's going to be private forces that try to chip away at it, but we fight. It's a never-ending battle and it's tiring, but I do believe that there is going to come a time, hopefully, when we do get Medicare for All and regardless of how long it takes, the conclusion is that it'll still be way too late, but it's better late than never. It's absolutely needed and it's the only solution to our absolutely atrocious for-profit privately run healthcare system, which is just not only a clusterfuck, but it is literally deadly.