841–850 of 1001 posts
This would be much easier to sell if everyone stopped referring to it in the context of “healthcare” and instead used “universal health insurance” or “universal health insurance rates”. The number of politicians that conflate healthcare and health insurance (notwithstanding the actual convergence of the two through payers’ purchasing provider entities) is mind boggling. Striking the word “healthcare” from the convers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uninsured Americans are in fact universally included in death statistics and in cancer survival outcomes; we have top-tier cancer outcomes. Europe has several universal coverage systems without single payer. The original sin of the US system isn't private insurance, it's employment-based coverage; that's the thing nobody else has.
Again, you cite zero sources. Survival rates for lung cancer in the USA, the most common cancer in the world, are much lower than Japan and South Korea. South Korea is single payer and Japan has strict government regulation of healthcare costs. The second most common cancer is Breast Cancer. The USA is "top-tier" but so is pretty much every other Western Country. Australia, also famously single-payer is a mere 0.4% b…
I'm not saying that the US is better than every other country. I explicitly said somewhere else on this thread that there's a common critique of our outcomes that we just do detection better, and that our life expectancy outcomes aren't materially better.
What I am saying is that it's difficult to make a case that US life expectancy is materially altered by our health insurance system. You won't be able to use cancer to make that case, because the US has in fact quite good cancer outcomes. That's it: that's the whole argument.
Again, though: this repeated claim that "the uninsured aren't included in survival statistics" --- I don't know where that's coming from. It's not true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not why. Doctors also make drastically more than the median wage. Doctors make so much in the US because we have artificial scarcity of doctors.
i mean sure, but all skilled labor is trending towards 200-300K wages in the us. if a "senior" software engineer can make half a mil, and an electrician can make 200k, of course doctor pay are high. who is going to take 10-15 years of school and debt otherwise?
Legislate transparent pricing for all medications and procedures first. Paying 40 dollars for lozenges in the ER is insane. Right now the system has an opaque pricing structure which makes no sense. Force hospitals to expose API's with transparent pricing.
As a person living in Germany I find it insane that this hasn't been solved by the US of A. What the actual hell is going on?
Universal Health Coverage has a lot of other benefits: 1. It detaches health insurance from the employment market. This means those minimum wage walmart jobs just became more feasible, or any low end job really, since their is no pressure to provide "benefits" anymore. This would seriously lubricate the labor market, because the friction to providing, taking, and changing a job is reduced. 2. It ends a bias for group…
As a Canadian, I would caution against the kind of universal health plan we have. But yes I agree there should be some kind of public healthcare. Perhaps more as a government owned hospitals and clinics alongside the private ones rather than the fully public system we have here which comes with its own host of problems. I think it's easy to shout free healthcare as a slogan but I think the important bit is how it's i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what's the solution? Some states have already limited malpractice liability but that hasn't done much to hold down costs. When patients are harmed by preventable medical errors they should be compensated.
When patients are harmed by quacks, it is a true problem and those quacks should be incarcerated and never allowed near medicine again. If there are too many quacks, then this is a systemic problem that needs to be addressed completely separately from malpractice and professional insurance. When patients are harmed by medical errors caused by non-quacks, that's just tough luck. Not everyone can be saved. Creating a g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, you cite zero sources. Survival rates for lung cancer in the USA, the most common cancer in the world, are much lower than Japan and South Korea. South Korea is single payer and Japan has strict government regulation of healthcare costs. The second most common cancer is Breast Cancer. The USA is "top-tier" but so is pretty much every other Western Country. Australia, also famously single-payer is a mere 0.4% b…
Start with CONCORD-3. I'm not saying that the US is better than every other country. I explicitly said somewhere else on this thread that there's a common critique of our outcomes that we just do detection better, and that our life expectancy outcomes aren't materially better. What I am saying is that it's difficult to make a case that US life expectancy is materially altered by our health insurance system. You won't…
There are a lot of people making a lot of money on the inefficiencies of the US system. They won’t give up their revenue streams without a fight, and they are filthy rich on the backs of sick people. You better believe they will play dirty.
I saw Jim Clark (of SGI and Netscape fame) talk one time about his new healthcare startup (Healtheon). He said something insightful that captures a lot of why it's hard to get things done in general: one person's inefficiency is someone else's bottom line.
Last I heard healthcare is like the only employment sector that's seeing real growth right now.
I would like to know if anyone has a method or resource to cover rough calculations on things like: 1) how much cost comes from "friction" like middleman, administrative bloat, shitty digitalization/note sharing, all the time the nurses and doctors have to spend on paperwork... Etc. 2) how much drug development is subsidized by the US patient via higher domestic vs. foreign pricing. Or even how much of the cost total…
And then ICU/end of life. Way too many Americans don’t ever talk about what will happen when they die and what they do or don’t want at the end of life. Then they become incapacitated, family pursues all advanced therapies because they don’t know what to do and they spend a long time in the ICU getting things done for an unclear goal