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I always feel like people who make this sort of argument around health care in the US (that the health industry doesn’t want cheap cures because it will reduce

I always feel like people who make this sort of argument around health care in the US (that the health industry doesn’t want cheap cures because it will reduce their profit from expensive treatments) are forgetting one of the major players in this… the insurance companies. Health insurance companies love cheap cures, because that means lower costs and more profit for them. They have every incentive to promote cheap cures, and are a huge industry that spends a ton of money on lobbying.

pmoriarty 5y ago
The search for quick cures (both by insurance companies and time/money-limited patients) is one of the major reasons that relatively short-acting psychedelics like MDMA, psilocybin and ketamine are popular. The even faster acting psychedelics like DMT (NN-DMT) and 5-MeO-DMT are also likely to become popular for the same reason. Their use may eventually eclipse more traditional and slower acting psychedelics, because what could be more convenient than tripping for 15 minutes, being "cured" of your depression, and then going on with the rest of your day?
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>Health insurance companies love cheap cures, because that means lower costs and more profit for them. If things are easy and cheap to cure do you really need insurance against them?
- msla 5y ago
  If you can come up with a miracle drug sovereign against a catastrophic car crash, we're all ears.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I said: If things are easy and cheap to cure do you really need insurance against them? evidently you think catastrophic car crashes are something that are easy and cheap to cure? If so, it is I that am all ears. on edit: changed is all ears to am all ears, while the former is, I believe, grammatically correct, it is the latter in idiomatic usage.
    - msla 5y ago
      I'm saying that, even if somehow all "illness" were cheap and easy to cure[1], we'd still need health insurance for injury, especially sudden and catastrophic injury, such as car accidents. [1] And defining "illness" as distinct from "injury" isn't all that easy.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        and I'm saying that I obviously never said otherwise.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Health insurance companies love collecting insurance money and not paying out. Denying coverage, not covering procedures, not covering full treatments, not covering the full staff needed for a procedure, covering suboptimal but cheap treatments are some of the other tools in their toolset. Let’s not pretend that installing one more extraction point accountable only to shareholders between patients and their care is somehow driving progress.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  What's the alternative?
  - Centigonal 5y ago
    Single payer? Medicaid as an option for everybody? A public insurance option? Cost transparency or anti-trust regulation that helps further commodify health insurance and drive down costs? Stealing ideas from the several dozen other countries that have solved the point-of-care cost problem?
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      I'm all for these suggestions, but they don't address any of the problems listed in the post I was replying to: "Health insurance companies love collecting insurance money and not paying out. Denying coverage, not covering procedures, not covering full treatments, not covering the full staff needed for a procedure, covering suboptimal but cheap treatments are some of the other tools in their toolset." Exactly the same problems can and do occur with single-payer, medicaid, etc...
      - cortesoft 5y ago
        The difference is that a single-payer system doesn’t have the people deciding what to pay making more money if they pay out less.
    - nine_k 5y ago
seanhunter 5y ago
That is first-order thinking. After all, if healthcare was cheap no-one would be incentivised to pay a lot of premium for health insurance. It's in the health insurance companies interest for people to be frightened of high costs of healthcare that they pay and then to only pay out less than they receive in premium.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  This doesn’t follow. Having cures for chronic, expensive to care for diseases won’t reduce the demand for health insurance, because people can still get injured or get one of the other countless ways to need healthcare.
- pdfernhout 5y ago
  To build on your second-order point, under Obamacare, health insurers get to keep a certain percentage of premiums based on what treatments costs but would have to refund the rest. So, it is in the financial interest of insurance companies for medical interventions to be expensive and recurring. I found this surprising, because, like the poster you are replying to, it does make sense at a first-order level that insurance companies would make more profits if they paid out less for a specific individual's health issue. But the second order effect of skimming a percentage of total costs probably dominates here. And of course, for-profit medical care systems and individual doctors also generally have no financial incentive to contain costs.

pmoriarty 5y ago

The search for quick cures (both by insurance companies and time/money-limited patients) is one of the major reasons that relatively short-acting psychedelics like MDMA, psilocybin and ketamine are popular. The even faster acting psychedelics like DMT (NN-DMT) and 5-MeO-DMT are also likely to become popular for the same reason. Their use may eventually eclipse more traditional and slower acting psychedelics, because what could be more convenient than tripping for 15 minutes, being "cured" of your depression, and then going on with the rest of your day?

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>Health insurance companies love cheap cures, because that means lower costs and more profit for them. If things are easy and cheap to cure do you really need insurance against them?

msla 5y ago
If you can come up with a miracle drug sovereign against a catastrophic car crash, we're all ears.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I said: If things are easy and cheap to cure do you really need insurance against them? evidently you think catastrophic car crashes are something that are easy and cheap to cure? If so, it is I that am all ears. on edit: changed is all ears to am all ears, while the former is, I believe, grammatically correct, it is the latter in idiomatic usage.
  - msla 5y ago
    I'm saying that, even if somehow all "illness" were cheap and easy to cure[1], we'd still need health insurance for injury, especially sudden and catastrophic injury, such as car accidents. [1] And defining "illness" as distinct from "injury" isn't all that easy.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      and I'm saying that I obviously never said otherwise.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Health insurance companies love collecting insurance money and not paying out. Denying coverage, not covering procedures, not covering full treatments, not covering the full staff needed for a procedure, covering suboptimal but cheap treatments are some of the other tools in their toolset. Let’s not pretend that installing one more extraction point accountable only to shareholders between patients and their care is somehow driving progress.

pmoriarty 5y ago
What's the alternative?
- Centigonal 5y ago
  Single payer? Medicaid as an option for everybody? A public insurance option? Cost transparency or anti-trust regulation that helps further commodify health insurance and drive down costs? Stealing ideas from the several dozen other countries that have solved the point-of-care cost problem?
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    I'm all for these suggestions, but they don't address any of the problems listed in the post I was replying to: "Health insurance companies love collecting insurance money and not paying out. Denying coverage, not covering procedures, not covering full treatments, not covering the full staff needed for a procedure, covering suboptimal but cheap treatments are some of the other tools in their toolset." Exactly the same problems can and do occur with single-payer, medicaid, etc...
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      The difference is that a single-payer system doesn’t have the people deciding what to pay making more money if they pay out less.
  - nine_k 5y ago

seanhunter 5y ago

That is first-order thinking. After all, if healthcare was cheap no-one would be incentivised to pay a lot of premium for health insurance. It's in the health insurance companies interest for people to be frightened of high costs of healthcare that they pay and then to only pay out less than they receive in premium.

cortesoft 5y ago
This doesn’t follow. Having cures for chronic, expensive to care for diseases won’t reduce the demand for health insurance, because people can still get injured or get one of the other countless ways to need healthcare.
pdfernhout 5y ago
To build on your second-order point, under Obamacare, health insurers get to keep a certain percentage of premiums based on what treatments costs but would have to refund the rest. So, it is in the financial interest of insurance companies for medical interventions to be expensive and recurring. I found this surprising, because, like the poster you are replying to, it does make sense at a first-order level that insurance companies would make more profits if they paid out less for a specific individual's health issue. But the second order effect of skimming a percentage of total costs probably dominates here. And of course, for-profit medical care systems and individual doctors also generally have no financial incentive to contain costs.