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We need to outlaw for profit anything with healthcare. The incentives are misaligned with society’s needs.
by azinman2 4y ago
We need to outlaw for profit anything with healthcare. The incentives are misaligned with society’s needs.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoWhy only healthcare specifically?
- l33t233372 4y agoWe’ve seen that having a profit motive is, to a point, generally good in many areas of commercial life. Healthcare is not one of these areas.
- dariusj18 4y agoLet's do the same for housing
- wahnfrieden 4y agoI'm asking why the difference? Why is it good for society sometimes, and sometimes terribly wrong, in your view?
- darkmarmot 4y agoInelastic demand is one oft cited trait.
- antisthenes 4y agoExternalities of the absence of something can be small, large, positive or negative. What do you think are the externalities of _not_ having healthcare available to majority of your population ?
- wahnfrieden 4y agoYou rephrased the question
- mondocat 4y agoBecause there shouldn't be a variety of price points, and innovation should not be hoarded. Healthcare should be uniformly the best it can be.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoAgree but the question is why specifically only healthcare
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoA lot of people are perfectly happy with private healthcare. I happen to be one of them. But I'm also not opposed to my tax money funding the county hospital either. We can have both.
- mucholove 4y agoPrivate is not the same thing as for profit. A non-profit is a private entity. They are not part of the public sector. In fact, much healthcare was delivered like so pre-WW2. Still today, Kaiser and Cleveland Clinic are non-profit.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoI'm happy with my private, for-profit healthcare. But I'm also glad to support public healthcare services with taxes. It's not just one or the other, we can have both of them.
- M95D 4y agoProbably because you are generally healthy...
- soco 4y agoI will mention again for the fun of it, that private healthcare for profit works very fine in other places, like Switzerland for which I can vouch. There might be a lesson somewhere, maybe?
- robertlagrant 4y agoSadly this probably means no covid vaccine and few advancements. It's easy to spread out what we have; it's hard to run an engine of care and innovation at the same time. Choose hard.
- mikeyouse 4y agoI appreciate that R&D funding requires investment, but that doesn't have much to do with hospital reimbursement rates -- especially when the alternative of a more European-style healthcare system comes along with a German company inventing one of the two Covid vaccines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech)..
- robertlagrant 4y ago"European-style" isn't so much of a thing. There are all sorts of models. BioNTech is a public listed for-profit company that partnered with Pfizer, a public listed for-profit company, to develop that vaccine. There needs to be lots of profit in healthcare for anyone to do anything, or even to be in a position to do anything.
- mikeyouse 4y agoOf course there's a European style in contrast to the American style.. Single payer coverage governed by a government/quasi-government body with no profit taking and rates for drugs and care negotiated by the payer. Some have free point-of-service care, some have copayments, some have private insurance or supplemental insurance but the contours are the same. There are dozens of huge pharma companies in Europe inventing life-saving drugs with plenty of profits to go around, this conceit that we need to price gouge Americans to pay for Research while the same firms spend more on marketing than R&D is just the dumbest thing.
- nostromo 4y agoEuropean drugs are often funded by their profits from America.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoThe overwhelming majority of hospitals are nonprofit. The overwhelming majority of prisons are run by the state. The overwhelming majority of higher education is nonprofit. The Catcholic church circa 1500 was nominally nonprofit. PE probably does turn everything to shit but acting like not having shareholders or owners who are looking to wring every cent out so they can get the fattest check will solve the problem seems naive at best.
- Pet_Ant 4y agoI think the problem here is that "profit motive" is reduced to capitalism. For politicians profit is votes so under funding hospitals and prisons to spend in high profile pork projects (can even be tax cuts) is still profit motive. It's a rational choice if they think they can get more votes, more bang for their buck, by spending it elsewhere. This isn't traditionally seen as "profit motive", but really it is because it was done for the private benefit instead of over arching ethical deliberations or calculations for net good etc.
- PenguinCoder 4y agoNon profit is a tax designation and that's it. Non profits, especially healthcare, still pay their execs and c suite multiple times *more* than physicians and staff, and cut corners and costs in many areas. Non profit status doesn't mean shit.
- danesparza 4y agoHaving a non-majority of something doesn't make it "not true" or "not matter". Why in the world would you include a statistic about the Catholic church in this conversation? Are you insinuating something? You can do better. You really need to put more context around your last comment. It's confusing at best.
- klyrs 4y agoI'm not sure about that. Private health care is largely beneficial in countries with strong socialized health care. I'm definitely no expert on financial regulation, but I see the practice of "flipping" businesses as the real problem. Where I live, we've recently introduced a "house flipping tax" (which doesn't go far enough, in my opinion, but that's another conversation). A similar approach could be taken to private sales of businesses: if you buy and sell a company in a relatively short period of time, the gains (from the sale, from income, etc) should be taxed at a steeply elevated rate.
- cptcobalt 4y agoYeah, private healthcare can always be a valid addition, but access to "strong socialized healthcare" should be a relatively good minimum floor — something many countries do not have. All humans need health maintenance, it doesn't need to be a "can I afford it" value proposition. I know friends currently living without it because they can't, even with subsidized social options... this is endemic to the problem of "socializing" a private healthcare system, where $ comes first.
- klyrs 4y agoAbsolutely. The US creates particularly perverse incentives. In countries with strong socialized healthcare, private offerings must be better than the public service to be worthwhile. In the US, private healthcare needs to be better than literally nothing when a big player buys up the competition.
- snacktaster 4y agoBoy you people really love banning things don't you. Why on earth would you _outlaw_ people from being able to see their private, for-profit family doctor.
- azinman2 4y agoI’m not sure who “you people” are. Doesn’t feel like that’s adding much to the conversation, nor does it incline me to participate.