4 ms·

Rising costs of healthcare are also a big issue in other top-wealth countries, and for better or worse, the US also does cutting edge health science that other

Rising costs of healthcare are also a big issue in other top-wealth countries, and for better or worse, the US also does cutting edge health science that other countries dont get close to. I find the comparison country vs country to be valuable, but somewhat limited. The U.S. is unique in a lot of aspects. For example in argentina(i know, not rich country but hear me out), that has public healthcare, healthcare spending per gdp has been cut in half in the last couple of decades: mostly because private healthcare ate up the market. Hybrid markets are a reasonable compromise. The US is also not a free market of healthcare, it has the worst of both worlds: highly regulated, intrusive and punishing state, with proteccionism and quotas. To this day I still believe the #1 healthcare policy issue is with the state's intervention. It is the FDA that makes pharma expensive, it is H1B quotas and medical licensing requirements that prevent foreign doctors to come to the US, it is Medicare that puts fee-for-service, it is the state that makes malpractice costly, etc etc.

omegaworks 9y ago
>for better or worse, the US also does cutting edge health science that other countries dont get close to. You're conflating two things. A large portion of "cutting edge health science" research is funded publicly. The private funding tends to focus on reformulating existing drugs and other less-risky bets. The real game changers come out of moon-shots made possible by government funding. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/376801357/u-s-funding-of-health-research-stalls-as-other-nations-rev-up https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/3768013...
- conanbatt 9y ago
  I think this conflates spending with results. I dont know enough to confirm or refute, but government science in general is pretty inefficient: yes it does things that the private sector wouldnt do that are valuable, but it does a lot of other things poorly and expensively. Not to mention that the very state makes researching drugs onerously expensive. It can take a billion dollars to get FDA approval, how is that reasonable.
  - tstrimple 9y ago
    > It can take a billion dollars to get FDA approval, how is that reasonable. It is unreasonable to have to prove drugs are safe before shipping them out to potentially millions of people? We must have very different definitions of reasonable.

omegaworks 9y ago

>for better or worse, the US also does cutting edge health science that other countries dont get close to. You're conflating two things. A large portion of "cutting edge health science" research is funded publicly. The private funding tends to focus on reformulating existing drugs and other less-risky bets. The real game changers come out of moon-shots made possible by government funding. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/376801357/u-s-funding-of-health-research-stalls-as-other-nations-rev-up https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/3768013...

conanbatt 9y ago
I think this conflates spending with results. I dont know enough to confirm or refute, but government science in general is pretty inefficient: yes it does things that the private sector wouldnt do that are valuable, but it does a lot of other things poorly and expensively. Not to mention that the very state makes researching drugs onerously expensive. It can take a billion dollars to get FDA approval, how is that reasonable.
- tstrimple 9y ago
  > It can take a billion dollars to get FDA approval, how is that reasonable. It is unreasonable to have to prove drugs are safe before shipping them out to potentially millions of people? We must have very different definitions of reasonable.