42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings

I recently suffered a knee injury that cost into the six figures and required experts to help me with insurance billing. I think we need to remove restrictions regulating how new doctors are trained, and how many new doctors and other medical professionals get lice sed each year. I would even get rid of the requirements to have a license.

I don't think it should require $320k in student debt to become a doctor. I think that traps people who may switch careers later into a career they dislike. The only reason the prices are that high is that a limited number of schools control a monopoly on healthcare education.

I saw that insurance companies are legally capped to only keep 20% of each dollar spent on healthcare. A competitive insurance company could keep less of course. I also saw that out of each dollar spent on healthcare, 23% goes to prescription drugs, 22% to doctors, 20% to office and clinic visits, 16% to hospitals. https://www.ahip.org/health-care-dollar/

Prescription drugs should not be as expensive as they are either. This is due to overly strong patent laws preventing competition and stifling innovation. Each new drug is the end result of an avalanche of human work through centuries and the one little idea that advances things slightly should not be long term locked up by a patent. This greatly slows the creative avalanche. I think we would see far more new drugs at a far lower cost if we did away with patents. Science should not be owned by any individual or group.

The cost of healthcare is ballooning and is out of reach of many people and bankrupts many more. The number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical bills. Healthcare costs as a share of GDP have grown from 5% in 1960 to 18% in 2018. This shows that the cost itself is the problem, not just insurance companies. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-expendi...

How can we solve healthcare's cost while improving outcomes and getting face time with medical professionals for patients? I am proposing we allow many more people to enter the field by removing artificial regulations preventing competition. This is a standard approach suggested by economists... https://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3...

As an entrepreneur, I would like to see doctors innovate with new business models in healthcare... Unfortunately business models are strictly regulated in this industry just as supply of medical professionals is regulated.

What are your thoughts on how to solve the problem of the very high cost of healthcare?

Sometimes I think I'm really lucky. I was dx'd with stage 2b Hodgkin's lymphoma 20 years ago. Half a year of twice-monthly chemotherapy and then an agonizing month of daily radiation doses was able to eradicate the disease. Because of the health insurance I had with the startup I was then working for, my total out-of-pocket cost to was $0. We never paid a single co-pay or saw a single bill for any of the treatment (there were co-pays for the 10 years of follow-up visits).

To this day I don't know what the total cost of saving my life was. I guess it was 6 digits USD.

I contrast to the health insurance I have now. Were I to get sick like that again, I know my out of pocket expenses would be at least $8K per year, and I expect I'd hit that limit several times over the course of the follow-up period.