Comment by caddemon
3 years ago
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.
Only because you are looking at the country total. Adjusted per capita, US has 7.6 transplants per million population, while eg France has 6.2. Which means, it’s pretty close.
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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