Comment by hughes

3 years ago

What's unethical is a system that completely drains a person's wealth for getting sick.

Certainly this happens for procedures that should be cheap, and nursing homes are also a huge issue. But in the current discussion it's not clear to me that something like a heart transplant should be cheap. Development of a novel treatment can be very expensive and sometimes involves scarce resources.

  • Heart transplant is free in countries with a tenth of USA GDP per Capita. And it's not a major cost in their health systems.

    American healthcare system is absurdly inefficient.

  • In most developed countries heart transplants are literally free. That's what proper healthcare system is for.

    • The US alone does ~2/3 of worldwide heart transplants, I think there is a tradeoff here. It's also not actually $1 million out of pocket for most people.

      2 replies →

  • It can't be cheap, and in any high quality medical system apart from US thats not a concern for the patient, ever, at all.

    One of those cases where US individualism and utter lack of social thinking (completely unrelated to socialism/communism but many simpler folks fail to distinguish that) screws up needful parts of society