So was mine, they do coexist. Quite smoothly most of the time.

My experience as well, when I was helping my elderly cousin. You do get buried in mailed statements though, telling you what is not your responsibility to pay.

Oh yes, every month I get a statement of what drugs I bought, what they paid, what I paid, and some of the price is never explained. I guess that's what the druggist is eating. The purpose is supposedly for us to report to Aetna if the druggist is charging for shit we don't get. the last page(both sides) explains they don't discriminate, in a zillion languages, every damn month.

This morning I went to my GP, that cost $5. He sent me to the phlebotomist, no charge, and down to X-ray, $5. That's it , everything else is covered. Last three times in the hospital, one in ER, and two for surgery, it cost me $2 to park for four days. I can live with that.

We have the NHS paid for by taxation - but we also have private medicine. Many reasonably decent remuneration packages will offer some kind of private medical insurance as one of the perks. Other employers offer access to discounted private medical insurance (I could have chosen that in my job).

And dental care is a mishmash of NHS and private provision. Often the same dentist will offer NHS treatments and also private treatments for the things NHS won't cover - e.g deep sedation is not available on NHS so has to charged at the private care cost, along with cosmetic stuff like veneers. But that same dentist may also do a root canal at NHS price.

The private and public systems interact quite a bit. The doctors working in the private sector will also often do work in the NHS and will almost certainly have been trained within the NHS and their university studies heavily subsidised with public funds. Private hospitals may have NHS procedures carried out there and some wards in NHS hospitals are primarily for private care.

The lines have become much more blurred in recent years. That said, when I started working at a hardware sales company in the late 90s BUPA* cover was one of the perks


*one of the main and best known providers of private medical care in the UK

The hospitals are like airlines, they all have First Class and Coach. ;)

And that's fine in both cases of they get you to your destination.

Risk Corridor. This is part of the ACA that mitigated risk of losses to insurance companies and convinced them to sign on to the ACA. But Rubio killed it causing Insurance companies to start fleeing the plans. Very interesting. [/arte johnson]