Comment by quickConclusion
7 years ago
>Since 2014, eight other babies have been born to women who had uterus transplants, all in Sweden
Just to show that single payer system can be good for medical innovation, not just universal healthcare.
7 years ago
>Since 2014, eight other babies have been born to women who had uterus transplants, all in Sweden
Just to show that single payer system can be good for medical innovation, not just universal healthcare.
It looks like the swedish transplants were funded by research at a university, not insurance: http://sahlgrenska.gu.se/english/research/uterus/questions (though perhaps that's a distinction without a difference?)
> The cost of a uterus transplantation is estimated to be around SEK 100,000 per patient. [...] > Will this cost the patient anything? > No. The first initial experiments with uterus transplantation will be covered entirely by research funding.
Apparently some of the research also came from a Professor in the US:
> The team learned this technique at the University of Connecticut and received help at the beginning from Professor John McCracken, who is a pioneer in reproductive medical research. It took about a year before the autotransplantation method on sheep worked well.
Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this, or if they did there might be a really limited supply. (I suppose the supply would be inherently limited anyway by how many available uteri there are)
Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer. For example apparently private insurance is becoming more popular in Sweden:
> The number of people purchasing supplementary private insurance is rapidly increasing, from 2.3 per cent of the population in 2004 (Swedish Insurance Federation 2004) to approximately 4.6 per cent in 2008 (Trygg-Hansa 2008). The voluntary health insurance mainly gives quick access to a specialist and allows for jumping the waiting queue for elective surgery (Glenngård et al. 2005).
http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/98417/E9...
> Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this,
I wouldn't think they would, but the existence of a single-payer system didn't prevent research on this.
> Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer.
What you mean in this case is purely single-payer. Paying for things that are outside of normal health care, like fancy private rooms or plastic surgery don't seem like they would have a negative effect. Getting quick access to a specialist seems problematic, though, but maybe the quick access to a specialist means ability to quickly consult with a foreign specialist; there's not a lot of detail there.
I am actually a Swedish citizen and I'm happy we still go partiallly by Keynes and not Friedman. So the taxes I'm paying I'm happy goes partially towards the betterment of all of humanity. A functioning public sector with regulation drives technological EVOLUTION as all markets stagnate wo regulation and injections of assets.
I would rather this innovation not be made with my taxes. The money thrown at this could have done so much elsewhere.
Luckily Sweden is a civilised country where individuals don’t get to choose the medical needs of other people they don’t know.
Would you please not take HN threads into national flamewars? The parent comment may not have been substantive but this direction is even worse.
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