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People here comparing medicine with car mechanics don't have the slightest idea of what they're talking about. The US system is in the hands of the administrat

• tdeck 6y ago
  That's not entirely true; doctors have massive political and financial power. The AMA is run by doctors and has consistently lobbied against government funded healthcare for more than a century. They killed FDR's and Truman's proposals and lobbied hard against Medicare and Medicaid in the 1970s.
  • rscho 6y ago
    Docs have power over their own turf (losing ground to admin every day that passes). They incidentally absolutely do not have power over the billing scheme in it's entirety, especially since healthcare juggernauts like Kaiser have appeared. Today, docs are really a small part of the problem but people stay fixated on them both because of envy and because docs are used as strawmen by big healthcare, whose stakeholders have every reason to reduce docs into slavery. Docs use the AMA to avoid being converted into Amazon warehouse workers? Big surprise.
• refurb 6y ago
  No, it’s not private healthcare that’s the issue, it’s the absurd layer of regulations that were developed over the past 70+ years. Typically some inefficiency was addressed with regulation that just created a new inefficiency. To give you a good example - 340b is a govt regulation that requires drug manufacturers to give a 23% discount off drugs to hospitals that treat a lot of low income patients. Great idea right? Well, that just incentivized hospitals to buy up standalone oncology clinics, fold them into the hospital and then capture that sweet 23% margin on drugs without actually using it to help low income patients. As a result there are almost no community oncologists now, they almost all work for hospitals and good luck starting your own clinic now. Good intentions that just made the problem worse.
  • rscho 6y ago
    In my book, the problems begin as soon as the healthcare system is required to be lucrative. And don't tell me not-for-profit hospitals are not lucrative. It would be even worse without regulations. Care providers would illegally organize into cartels (which is of course already happening) and going to see the doc would then really just be like bringing your car to the garage, with all the 'niceties' that go with that. I don't expect to convince any free market proponent, since to really grasp what I mean by all that those people would have to experience the private system from the inside (as I do). Private interests are very much the problem. Healthcare should be a public service.
    • zo1 6y ago
      I've seen first hand the opposite in my country, where free market private health care is working almost near perfection. All it takes is minimal regulation and then watching the healthy patient incentives aligning with the profit motive without government meddling. And I've been watching in real time as the government is actively blocking and preventing this same functioning private healthcare system from acquiring covid vaccines. Right now, this "evil" private healthcare provider has all the money and willingness to vaccinate us all for free, but the government is denying it because they want a slice of the potential Profit to pay for the vaccines for the rest of the country. So you tell me who is evil because of money.
      • rsj_hn 6y ago
        Curious, which country are you referring to?
        • zo1 6y ago
          South Africa...I looked on the wiki page for it now, and it doesn't do the state of healthcare here justice.
          • rscho 6y ago
            Ok, so we must have very different views of public health if you consider the south african system to work near perfection. I mean, can you really say that given south african HIV prevalence? And that's just an example among many others.