We desperately need to vastly increase the number of physicians in this country to decrease costs. The AMA is the most powerful trade union in history and has locked the number of new doctors a year for many years now. Restricting supply for a service with inelastic demand skyrockets prices and lines their pockets.
'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
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Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#132[dead]
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#133[dead]
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quick summary: the US does not have anything approaching a modern healthcare system. (And likely will not for quite some time due to a set of structural factors.) Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act or ACA) was an attempt to expand coverage and slow the rate of increase of costs. It did the former but less well with the latter. One other thing the ACA did is stop the scourge of scam insurers. This is a thing where peo…
Health care is fine here if you have a decent job. Health care is not that great in public systems and you still pay for it with higher taxes
And naturally you make this absolute claim because you've undoubtably lived in more countries than just the United States, right?
As point of reference, I lived in Taiwan for years - they have a national health insurance system, and taxes are comparable if not lower in some situations to the United States.
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#135Where does all that money go to, though? Is there a rich caste of doctors or pharmaceutical shareholders that don't need to work and live off these dividends? Or is the system so inefficient that most people in it aren't contributing to actual health care?
Doctors are by far the highest paid professional occupation in America. The AMA is the most powerful trade union in history and restricts the number of new doctors, pushing up prices.
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#136[flagged]
You don't need it until you need it, and needing it often comes in the form of a lightning strike from blue sky. The counterargument is that having everyone pay a higher amount makes it feasible to actually have this coverage available, when needed, without bankrupting the insurance companies, because the rare astronomically expensive care is covered by the premiums paid by the vast majority of people who are relativ…
What I don't understand however is what IS actually expensive about the care itself?
Doc will get paid his normal rate, $500k per year (maybe more maybe less?) Nurses all get paid something between 100k and 200k (maybe more maybe less?)
Then we hear about these surgeries that cost 100k.
What exactly is costing 100k for 5 hours of knife and time in a bed?
Wildfire, I understand, there is no way to re-materialize a house for less than (what is basically a fortune these days). But time and materials for a surgery seem to me that it should cost 5k at most?
And at those rates, wouldn't everyone just pay like $15 a month? And if the answer to this question is malpractice costs, can we have two plans:
I trust you doc: $15 / month
I might sue the doc after: $1500 / month
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#137Nationalize health care. Doctors should work for the government, hospitals should be owned by the government; for profit health care is a scam.
Your taxes would double, and don't even bother trying to say they wouldn't literally every country with public health care pays twice as much as we do in tax
We pay more tax for healthcare in the US than virtually anyone else. Last I looked, only Norway had us beat in terms of taxes for healthcare.
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#138I have some questions but I don't want to offend anybody. Aren't there any methods to contract the healthcare to lower the prices down? I heard that in UK they have some requirements that the prices must not go higher than... For a given type of service. Also I read a lot of articles that giving a tablet to a hospitalised person costs 20-50 bucks and people are generally running away from ambulances to not pay
Japan has something to that effect. There are ways to make it happen.
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#139We desperately need to vastly increase the number of physicians in this country to decrease costs. The AMA is the most powerful trade union in history and has locked the number of new doctors a year for many years now. Restricting supply for a service with inelastic demand skyrockets prices and lines their pockets.
Bullshit. The AMA is a voluntary membership organization, not a trade union. They have no power to set prices or engage in collective bargaining.
The immediate bottleneck on producing more physicians is limited Medicare funding for residency slots. Every year some students graduate from medical school with an MD but are unable to practice medicine because they don't get matched to a residency program (some do get matched the following year). At one point the AMA did lobby Congress to restrict that funding but they reversed position several years back.
Re: 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs
#140At what point does it become a better financial decision to do telehealth and medical procedures completely in a different country? Can you be health insured outside of the country you live?
Sometimes it doesn't matter about the insurance if the price is right. Medical tourism is a thing already.