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High cost of medical care is an orthogonal problem to a healthiness level of Americans. Even if Americans were the most healthy nation in the world, medical car
by kjksf 16y ago
High cost of medical care is an orthogonal problem to a healthiness level of Americans. Even if Americans were the most healthy nation in the world, medical care and health care insurance would still be expensive.
As to the school example: if dissatisfaction with schools system won't lead to improvement or replacement, then what will? Certainly not satisfaction.
I don't see anything ironic in that post. Both the high cost of health care and (objectively measured) low quality of school system are real problems that affect almost all americans. The fact that there are other problems that affect them as well doesn't make them any less problematic.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoTo show that high cost of health care is not a problem, consider the following thought experiment: if you never visited the doctor but were healthy, would you be unhappy? Similarly, if we had no school system, but every person developed useful skills, would we be worse off? Premature narrowing of the problem also leads you to solutions that might be counterproductive. For example, to reduce the cost of health care (or at least prevent further increases), we could deliberately stifle innovation. This would reduce costs because instead of spending $250,000/person on the (to be invented) Alzheimers cure, we just spend $10k/year warehousing them and waiting for them to die. This is a partial solution to the stated problem of high costs. It isn't a solution to the real problem of poor health.