Money has to play a part in it because the people and companies working to deliver the care need to be paid somehow or they’ll eventually have to stop doing it.
This is a resource allocation problem. People (whether individually or collectively) work to create things of value and direct some percentage of that to medical treatment. If that is wasted in rare cases, that’s unfortunate but we accept some amount imperfection. If it’s wasted in a lot of cases, many other people will go without needed care who didn’t have to if we allocated that spend more effectively.
The real answer in the US is vested interest. The health case sector accounts for 20% of US GDP, double the value in countries with better outcomes and nationalized systems. Fixing the system so it doesn’t cost so much is against the financial interest of an enormous number of people. Sometimes democracy leads to suboptimal outcomes like this.
It's not just expensive treatments unfortunately. A very significant proportion of healthcare expenditure comes from caring for patients that can't take care of themselves (in fact that's 90% of the reason hospitals exist at all).
It’s also sometimes needlessly expensive when companies make excess profits on medical gear. It’s up to governments (is really) to help everyone get access to improved care.
Some, if not most, of this is a result of the insurance system. The insurance companies only pay x% of any given item, therefore the hospitals have to jack prices through the roof to collect enough to survive.
The problem with our healthcare system is that too much money goes to drug companies, medical device makers, and insurance companies and not enough makes it to the people actually providing the care. Its a bit more complicated than that, I'd admit, but that's the TLDR version.
Did you read the article? It was a very nuanced look at how to provide medical care and the reasons caregivers and people either under-treat or over-treat and the high levels of uncertainty about the efficacy of any given medical procedure. Certainly financial issues are a large part of the equation but certainly not the only one.
This is not about money. People go into healthcare because they want to help people. You can't go into such a job just for money, you'll never last. You have to fundamentally be wired to care for people. When people are not vaccinated and get sick it is extremely distressful for healthcare workers who are wired to help. That is the issue, not money.
1) You can pay for plenty of shit, but you can't pay for human feeling.
2) A tiny fraction of that money ends up in the pockets of people actually providing care - most of it ends up with pharma, device manufacturers, PBMs, and other middle-men. You can expect whatever great service you want for your money, but it doesn't work when that money isn't going to the people providing the service.
Everything's part of the problem. It's why it's so hard to find "the thing" that causes high US healthcare costs. Every single part of it is more expensive than it should be, including doctors, and it all adds up to a system that's way more expensive than it should be, without any single entity or group being responsible for most of the problem.
Profit isn't the only reason things cost to much. There is also just the fact that some things take too many resources to do.
Take the healthcare example, of cancer that we have a cure for but costs $2 million so no one gets it. The instinctive response is to say that is horrible, and that we should spend whatever it takes to cure someone... but should we?
Even if we said profit wasn't an issue, scarce resources still have to be allocated. Time and resources spent doing one thing means less to do something else.
Imagine a cure for cancer that required 10000 people to work 1000 hours each to produce... surely that would be too much to be worth it, right? Those are hours we can't do something else.
Even if we decided no amount of hours or resources were too many, we are still limited by the people we have and the resources available. We simply don't have enough to do everything.
So yes, maybe we can fix ANYTHING, but we certainly can't fix EVERYTHING
The problem with healthcare is that inefficiency and lack of transparency is profitable.
The government has deep pockets, and everyone is trying to get as much money as they can from it. Pharmaceutical industries, insurance providers, healthcare facilities, etc.
Pharmaceutical research is important and expensive, but there must be a way for that research to happen without doing stupid shit like making insulin expensive.
Labor costs in healthcare are high, but there must be a way to not make a bag of water with salt not cost $500.
People pay for costs that are completely unrelated for the products and services they are receiving.
I have some questions about American health care system.
If patients are being charged this much for anything, the money must be going to someone? Who's making all the money? Drug companies? Hospitals? Health insurance? Doctors or nurses? Why don't people honestly follow where the money end up and actually solve the problem once and for all. Increase the supply of X or many other bottlenecks by deregulation and result in decreased price?
the issue is funding... it doesn't matter if the hospital is run as a non-profit, as long as they are funded by insurance claims then the incentive is to do more expensive treatment... paying for more equipment, doctors etc
publicly-funded health care has the opposite problem - constant pressure to reduce the budget
The problem is intractable in no small part because most people are unwilling to acknowledge where the vast bulk of the money is going—-healthcare workers. They keep on looking for bad guys like insurance or drug company executives. There are some of these, and they do make a lot of money, but in the face of nearly $4 trillion in spending they don’t move the needle. The one million doctors do. The 3.8 million nurses do.
This is a resource allocation problem. People (whether individually or collectively) work to create things of value and direct some percentage of that to medical treatment. If that is wasted in rare cases, that’s unfortunate but we accept some amount imperfection. If it’s wasted in a lot of cases, many other people will go without needed care who didn’t have to if we allocated that spend more effectively.
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