Comment by jmyeet
3 days ago
Just look at the per-capita spending on healthcare by OECD countries, basically all of which have universal healthcare except for the US [1]. So the US pays almost twice as much as #2 (Switzerland) for significantly worse outcomes and less coverage.
The US healthcare system is an unmitigated disaster that is a cautionary tale in how capitalism only promotes rent-seeking and regulatory capture. It's done with a service with inelastic demand, meaning the threat of violence since we are quite intentionally withholding lifesaving healthcare for the sake of the profits of completely unnecessary intermediaries.
[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
This is what blows my mind about the universal health care opponents in the US. We would literally be spending less for better health care. People just cannot stomach their money going to the government instead of an unelected mega corp.
When Elizabeth Warren was promoting Medicare for All, she kept being asked the "how will you pay for it?" question over and over and over again. Debates, reporters, critics...
People hear "X increase in tax, 3*X decrease in costs" as "X increase in tax!"
"cautionary tale in how capitalism only promotes rent-seeking and regulatory capture" is a weird takeaway from this when the same applies to government-run healthcare. medicare, medicaid, veteran's affairs combined almost approaches OECD levels, but only covers a fraction of the population.
Medicare chooses the oldest (over 65), Medicaid chooses the poorest (who are more likely to have issues that went untreated and got worse) and most severely disabled, and Veterans' affairs chooses the ones who gave their bodies to Uncle Sam to be pushed out of planes, deafened in tanks, and have their backs wrecked with giant packs marched for several hours a day.
In other words, all patients that private insurers are likely delighted not to have on their books.
Welcome to the concept of "selection bias".
As another commenter put it, the government covers those with the highest cost of healthcare: veterans with varying degrees of disability, the elderly and the poor.
Another way to look at that is that insurance companies offload the highest cost people to the government so they can profit from the younger and healthier. How does that make sense?
You see this everywhere too, like with the push for privatization of education through charter schools and/or school vouchers. Some will point to the lower cost per student and completely ignore that the government education system doesn't get to be selective about students. State education caters to those with high-needs who are, just like with Medicare and the elderly, those that cost the most.