5 ms·

Costs are also somewhat ideological too. A good for instance is the US belief in suing any time something bad happens. From what I can tell, 10% of every dollar

Costs are also somewhat ideological too. A good for instance is the US belief in suing any time something bad happens. From what I can tell, 10% of every dollar spent on health care in the US goes towards malpractice insurance for doctors. A system that acknowledges that well-meaning doctors can make mistakes and shouldn't be unduly punished could cost almost that 10% less. America's health care system is designed for the %0.1 case literally at the expense of the %99.9 case. Also, the lack of universal coverage here means that a lot of medical bills go unpaid, for many reasons including bankruptcy or even people giving the emergency room a fake name when they go in. The hospitals don't just eat that cost, they amortize it into the costs paid by patients who do pay their bills. Universal coverage would, therefore, lower the cost of care per individual by eliminating the costs of trying to collect from uninsured people who can't pay. But the biggest ideological cost of health care in the US is our insistence on including the "free" market in paying for health care. Insurers have a ~25% profit margin. A single-payer system could be very inefficient and yet still come in far below that cost.

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
> From what I can tell, 10% of every dollar spent on health care in the US goes towards malpractice insurance for doctors. A system that acknowledges that well-meaning doctors can make mistakes and shouldn't be unduly punished could cost almost that 10% less. There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't pay for the damage caused by doctor's mistakes, you are just offloading part of the cost of your healthcare system onto a few unlucky people. If you do pay for it but it's not paid for by the doctors, you just re-invented malpractice insurance but with a different source of funding.
- curun1r 9y ago
  Ahh...but what percent of malpractice payments are consumed by legal fees? Enough for many, many free lunches. Also, if health care coverage were universal, we wouldn't need big medical settlements to cover future medical costs since those costs would already be covered. But mistakes happen. How you deal with those mistakes is an ideological question. Do patients who suffer from those mistakes deserve large settlements to the detriment of the vastly larger amount of patients that receive quality care? The US system believes that while other countries choose to lower costs at the expense of those unlucky few.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

TheCoelacanth 9y ago

> From what I can tell, 10% of every dollar spent on health care in the US goes towards malpractice insurance for doctors. A system that acknowledges that well-meaning doctors can make mistakes and shouldn't be unduly punished could cost almost that 10% less. There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't pay for the damage caused by doctor's mistakes, you are just offloading part of the cost of your healthcare system onto a few unlucky people. If you do pay for it but it's not paid for by the doctors, you just re-invented malpractice insurance but with a different source of funding.

curun1r 9y ago
Ahh...but what percent of malpractice payments are consumed by legal fees? Enough for many, many free lunches. Also, if health care coverage were universal, we wouldn't need big medical settlements to cover future medical costs since those costs would already be covered. But mistakes happen. How you deal with those mistakes is an ideological question. Do patients who suffer from those mistakes deserve large settlements to the detriment of the vastly larger amount of patients that receive quality care? The US system believes that while other countries choose to lower costs at the expense of those unlucky few.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]