Comment by kakacik
10 hours ago
Whenever people here mention to my critique of US healthcare how its now mostly solved problem now, its 'good' to see the other side and reality. It certainly doesn't seem solved unless you have a million or two just laying around on the account, while mortgages and kids tuitions are paid. And I can easily imagine a long term condition or 10 which, if unlucky in terms of treatment cost coverage can wipe out that sum in a decade or two, for a single person.
Seriously, how can you guys consider this acceptable. I am not of faith but doesn't bible teach to be kind to your fellow men above all? One would expect more adherence to such basic moral rules in such conservative christian society.
> Whenever people here mention to my critique of US healthcare how its now mostly solved problem now
Who says that? I don't think anyone sane can believe that US healthcare is "solved".
I don’t know a single person in my life who thinks US healthcare is good, so that’s weird. And many my peers a have good jobs with good health insurance. Everyone I know has at least one bad story about insurance, if you’ve ever had more than really basic checkups.
The problem with the US system is that it doesn't know what it's trying to be.
If you did a socialist system then everything is "free" but possibly slow and expensive on the back end when the government isn't efficient.
If you did a libertarian system then everything is cheap but it's caveat emptor because nobody is stopping you from buying morphine for $10 from Amazon.
The US system isn't either one. It pretends to be a market sometimes but then has a bunch of rules to thwart competition. Doctors are required by law to do residency but the government limits the number of residency slots in response to lobbying from the AMA so there aren't enough doctors. "Certificate of need" laws explicitly prohibit new competitors for various services. Insurance is tied to employment to make it hard for individuals to shop around. Laws encourage, require or have the government provide "prescription drug coverage" to make patients price insensitive so drug companies can charge a huge premium for patenting a minor improvement or simple combination of existing drugs and have the patient will something which is marginally if at all better even if it's dramatically more expensive because they don't see the cost when the insurance/government is required to pay for it.
It's a big pile of corruption, because all that money is going to places. But then if you try to fix it, half the population insists on doing the first one and the other half is only willing to do the second one, and the industry capitalizes on this to prevent either one.
Maybe instead we should do both rather than neither. Have the government provide a threshold level of services, like emergency rooms and free clinics and anything more than that the local government wants to fund, and then have a minimally regulated private system that anyone can use if the government system doesn't satisfy them.