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US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes, study finds
- beanjuiceII 5mo agoUS healthcare industry needs to drop more non-essential workers, and invest more in workers that produce value. the industry is so bloated no wonder its costs are high. Just to get my ears checked i had to be processed by 6 different people including phone systems doing precheck-ins. one person does the actual work!
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoIt will not change on your time horizon. If you want better healthcare, move to a developed country today. It will take a half decade or more for US healthcare to improve in any meaningful capacity, assuming the necessary events take place to enable improvement in the system. (to improve US healthcare, laws will need to change; when those laws change is a function of election outcomes and cadence; those election outcomes are a function of the electorate, who they vote for, and the rate of cohort turnover; think in systems)
- nozzlegear 5mo ago> It will take a half decade or more for US healthcare to improve in any meaningful capacity, This timeline seems wildly optimistic
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoMamdani has moved fast in NYC [1], faster change is possible when the motivated are in positions of leverage. I admit a five year time horizon is aspirational and dependent on “everything going right” with regards to election outcomes and the policy pipeline, from introduction to bill signing. I’m open to more realistic suggestions so I’m more accurate when I speak publicly on this topic (I help a non profit help US residents get out of the US, explaining the risk model of remaining in the US is a component of that work). [1] https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/ https://www.mamdanibulletin.com/
- bpt3 5mo ago> I help a non profit help US residents get out of the US, explaining the risk model of remaining in the US is a component of that work Congratulations, I think you just described the most ridiculous non-profit in existence.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoNot to (potentially vulnerable) humans who want or need out. If you can self serve the information and logistics to accomplish this, fantastic, but many cannot and therefore need some help. If you are happy on US soil, you're outside of the "charity expat migration consultant" TAM. It's actually been a fun exercise in building a gen AI solution to pour context into queries and get custom migration plans [eligible visas, employment connections at the destination, potential non traditional paths outside of work visas] out like an expat/migration plan vending machine. Output is verified by a human familiar with the problem space and away we go getting someone to where they want to go. "Make something people want. Don't worry too much about making money." The demand, I argue, is proven. You should try to be more curious. Record Numbers of Younger Women Want to Leave the U.S. - https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-women-leave.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-w... - November 13th, 2025 ["In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups."] Americans are leaving the US at rates not seen since the Great Depression — and 5,000 even gave up citizenship last year - https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/americans-leaving-us-rates-not-121500285.html https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/americans-leaving... - May 24th, 2026 Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47161219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47161219 - February 2026 (93 comments)
- bpt3 5mo agoSure, lots of people have no idea what it's like to live abroad and have doomers telling them to get out because it's not their fault they aren't successful in the country where the middle class has the highest disposable income in the world. I'm well aware they exist as a person who spends some amount of time online, so you can spare me the lecture about being curious. Those people would be better off under a more generous welfare state, but immigration policies in those nations are much less dysfunctional than our own. If you are able to offload some of these people onto another nation, I thank you, but it's a very odd focus for a charity. If you want an example of how uninformed the people inside your TAM are, see the younger women polled in your citation. Based on other data, I strongly suspect they are motivated to leave due to actual and potential changes in abortion law and policy in the US (which I do not support for the record), and have absolutely no clue whatsoever what rights they would have in most of the rest of the world (spoiler alert, it's less than most Americans have).
- maxerickson 5mo agoDid you mean half a century? Meaningful change in 5 years would be pretty amazing.
- stop50 5mo agoProbably 3 of them just working to prevent you from going.
- ramenat2am 5mo agoI think the industry itself would be more than happy to classify nurses and doctors as non-essential and drop them. Imagine the profit margins where you don't have to pay salaries to them.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- WizardK 5mo agoRight, most of those 6 are not medical staff, they are probably there for insurance and billing. And compared to Europe we don't even have a lot of doctors, US has fewer per capita. So the money is going to the billing layer, not to actual care.
- Legend2440 5mo agoThose people may actually be saving money by offloading work from a $250/hr doctor to a $25/hr secretary.
- lokar 5mo agoExcept the work saved should not be done at all.
- maxerickson 5mo agoMedical assistants and nurses work with you before the doctor to increase billable events for the doctor. You could describe this as saving money, but it's not the goal. Phone and front desk stuff is just administrative burden, scheduling the appointment and making a paper trail.
- kys11 5mo ago[dead]
- atmavatar 5mo agoThat's almost entirely due to how our private insurance industry works. Any given health provider has to deal with thousands of different insurers, and it's not uncommon for individual patients to have primary, secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary insurers the provider then has to deal with to get paid for a procedure. To keep health care workers focused on providing health care, providers hire a bunch of administrative workers whose job is to offload the work of haggling with insurance onto cheaper workers, but because there's so many insurers, and patients have so many layers of insurance, you end up with something close to 10 administrators per doctor. Alas, because there's so much money sloshing around in the system, and because the US government is so thoroughly corrupt with bribes from special interests, there's no movement to correct the problem. The system is unsustainable, though, so it will inevitably collapse in on itself at some point, causing a lot of misery and probably death before anything is fixed.
- tptacek 5mo agoWe know this isn't true, because CMS publishes annual numbers of the net costs of all these functions, and the total cost of service delivery absolutely dominates everything else. There is definitely annoying and pointless insurance overhead; anyone who has ever gone to the doctor for a followup appointment has seen that happen. It's just not where all the money is going. A thing that's always worth keeping in mind: retail clinical practice for non-geriatric adults is a very small fraction of all health care costs in the US, and end-of-life care is a very large fraction. Most of us only have exposure to the former, and we generalize from it, but that's not giving us an accurate picture.
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoThe administrative overhead is not trivial: probably about 25%. Worse is the distortion of incentives for healthcare providers. The giant leaky insurance tit is there to be sucked on, creating corruption at every level. When you are billed for a procedure you have no idea how much you are going to get charged or what you could get billed for. There could be gigantic opaque charges for things you have never heard of. Ticketmaster could only dream of such a rip-off. Not to mention blatant over-billing for unnecessary diagnostics, etc. Every year new kickback schemes are discovered.
- bell-cot 5mo agoThat "stupidly expensive" system provides extremely nice campaign donations, executives bonuses, stock appreciation, dividend checks, and paychecks to a stupidly large number of insiders. Even when they're (say) just medical billing clerks, who'll spend their entire careers arguing with the Denial Departments at various insurance companies, without every seeing an actual patient.
- isabelc 5mo agoIt's to be expected from a for-profit system.
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoEvery country has for-profit elements in their healthcare system. The USA is uniquely dysfunctional in its governance. There is regulatory capture at every level.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Every country has for-profit elements in their healthcare system You’re right. The Swiss system is deeply privatized, down to compulsory private insurance [1]. It just isn’t as opaque and corrupt as the American one. Part of the problem with the American system is everyone is cynical with respect to reform, and has a singular bogeyman they’re convinced explains all of the problem, with zero room for multiple causation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jancsika 5mo ago> and has a singular bogeyman they’re convinced explains all of the problem, with zero room for multiple causation Not sure about that. But each person tends to have something like a single sentinel flag. E.g.: does medicare negotiate drug prices? And if there's a change for the better, they won't believe it's anything but a short term grift until they read it back as "true" from at least 16 different threads over the course of, say, 9 consecutive years. Given that their representatives currently use phrases like "medicare advantage" to mean "off traditional medicare and on private insurance," that caution seems warranted.
- Schiendelman 5mo agoI want to agree with this, but these studies usually make a big mistake - they don't control out for the non healthcare reasons for low life expectancy. Americans drive cars and most live in unwalkable places. These impart significant risks that the healthcare system, no matter how good, wouldn't impact. Has anyone dug into this to identify whether they tried to account for built environment? Or food system?
- rsynnott 5mo ago> The US had the second-highest avoidable mortality rate—deaths caused by conditions that can be prevented with primary care or treated with timely medical intervention. Only Mexico had higher avoidable mortality. Similarly, the US also had the second-highest rating on years of potential life lost, a measure used to estimate premature death. Again, only Mexico had a higher rating. About 41k people die on the road in the US per year. While this is very high, and worse than pretty much any other developed country, it’s not going to move the needle _that_ much.
- nickff 5mo agoDriving everywhere has the collateral effect of ensuring that people get less exercise. Mexico has an astonishingly high obesity rate (a bit higher than the USA last time I checked), and this increases the risks of many non-car-related causes of death (and illness).
- rsynnott 5mo agoYeah, I’d buy that car-dependence is a problem there, especially for older people. Though, in Ireland, for instance, the worst parts of the country for car dependency would be close to as bad as the US. Their life expectancy is a little lower than the national one, but it’s not dramatic, and certainly not as low as the US one. There’s something else going on.
- nickff 5mo agoIn additional to the car dependency (and related issues), the USA still has many immigrants (legal and illegal) from poor countries, who likely have health issues that pre-exist their US residency.
- toasty228 5mo agoYeah but have you considered how good it is for the US gdp!
- 7e 5mo agoThe system is bad but the average American is obese, out of shape, and pre-diabetic, an atrocious diets and very little exercise. That doesn’t explain everything, but it does strain the system, which has to treat a lot more disease than a similar system with a fit population.
- bogota 5mo ago[dead]
- amazingamazing 5mo ago[flagged]
- forinti 5mo agoWhich only leads us to another problem: food. You can't have a healthy society if all policies are dictated by corporations.
- stevenwoo 5mo agoThere’s a fascinating case study on how this happens - Mexico had population much less overweight than USA until NAFTA was agreed to and cheap USA processed foods began inroads so that now Mexico has close to the same obesity issue that the USA has.
- enoint 5mo agoCould it also be highest per-capita calories from sugary drinks?
- danny_codes 5mo agoProbably more of a city design problem. Even modest exercise like walking your 8000 steps has a huge effect size. Exercise is a much more effective intervention than diet alone. America is designed to make people fat. There are places in America that don't have sidewalks. Sidewalks! It'd be funny if people weren't dying from it
- testing22321 5mo agoIt continues to baffle me that Americans put up with such an inferior and expensive system. There’s always talk of freedoms and being brave and being the best country in the world to live in, but very, very little effort of action to improve anything. The French riot in the streets if a single day of their extremely generous (by US standards) leave is taken away. Meanwhile Americand can’t get off the couch to protest, or are afraid of their own government if they do.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- protocolture 5mo ago>There’s always talk of freedoms and being brave and being the best country in the world to live in, but very, very little effort of action to improve anything. Its all just talk.
- an0malous 5mo agoOur country is captured by the top 1% of wealthy donors who are making a killing off the healthcare industry. Americans as a population aren’t putting up with anything, they just have no control. A citizen shot a healthcare executive in the street a couple years ago, that’s what people are resorting to now.
- airstrike 5mo agoCorrection: Americans as a population have been led to believe they have no control. They've forgotten what "we the people" means
- testing22321 5mo ago> Americans as a population aren’t putting up with anything, they just have no control So do something to get control. Americans have been conned that they live in the greatest country and that nothing needs to improve. And now you say they have no control. They are the workers. A six month general strike would literally change everything about the entire country, forever. They just lack the will.
- protocolture 5mo ago[flagged]
- lokar 5mo agoAmong many, there is a zero sum attitude. This goes back to the founding and slave owning in the south.
- jmspring 5mo agoAs an American, no. Well aside from - yes a significant part thrives on seeing others than them suffer. Years ago, I spent multiple times a year at a B&B on the Hilo side of the big island. The host was one of the last "Grand Dame's" of Hilo. She was a cattle rancher that knew Roosevelt; her husband had been a friend of Linus Pauling. She did hikes in her 70s and 80s few in those ages can do now. She was grandfathered under a form of medical insurance - I think older Blue Cross/Blue Shield - none can access now. At one point, the US did have better health care than we do at the moment. The fcking idiot boomers (including my parents) bought into the BS from Nixon, Reagan, etc. Hey - (good or bad) - let's stop allowing one to write off debt, but allow companies to do so, etc. This country does have it's head up it's ass and a significant number blame everyone but themselves and how they vote. We pay more (as a country) by a lot* and get significantly less for our medical coverage. Want to go self employed with a family of 3? Want a PPO? $4-6k/mo in California right now. Deductibles will be high.
- jazz9k 5mo ago[flagged]
- alex43578 5mo agoIn California, if you have insurance, you’re paying for everyone else that doesn’t. Homeless guy wants to spend half his time in the ER for fake claims? You’re paying. Some methhead has a fast heartbeat? Roll an ambulance and rush him to the ER.
- jmspring 5mo ago
- bogota 5mo ago[dead]
- airstrike 5mo agoI find it remarkable that most comments either criticizing the US healthcare system or expressing bewilderment at how Americans seemingly accept this have already been downvoted into dead territory. It's hard not to see those downvotes as copium or cognitive dissonance given no arguments have been presented to the contrary.
- LocalExt 5mo agoAnd not just the US healthcare, but the US education also...
- kgwxd 5mo agoDid someone do something that made people think that was going to change any time soon?
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoWhat's new is that health insurance is about to become an even bigger problem. 24 million Americans are insured under ACA. The current president has issued several executive orders that undermine the provision of ACA insurance and increase its cost. Millions are dropping coverage as the increases kick in. (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/obamacare-enrollment-decline.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mlA.AAbT.IuESs0d8wKR8&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/obamacare-enroll...)
- cheschire 5mo agoZero mention of wait times in the US compared to other countries. Pretty sure that's the chief complaint in most countries that have free-ish healthcare.
- Avicebron 5mo agoI mean, in rural America short of a trip to the ER with whatever wait time they have, getting a primary care doctor is barely possible and only affordable if your employer provides medical care, which many many don't.
- nielsbot 5mo agoUS wait time for many: infinity. why? because current system is profitable.
- jeremyjh 5mo agoWouldn't you expect to see that reflected in outcomes? TFA mentions that the only studied country with more avoidable mortality than the US was Mexico. If you aren't seeing it, maybe its not as big a problem as all the people who cannot afford any access to care at all while the country spends more per-person.
- wrs 5mo agoOddly, the country with the expensive ineffective healthcare with lower wait times (citation needed) is also the one that doesn’t have guaranteed paid sick leave and other facilities that would make wait times less of a factor.
- twoodfin 5mo agoThere’s not (typically) a regular measure of how much pain and disability a patient suffers while waiting for a hip replacement. It certainly would only show up in mortality statistics massively attenuated.
- swatcoder 5mo agoSure there are. Population measures of morbidity, days of lost work, patient satisfaction, etc are all captured and studied. Do you have indications that those are worse where wait times happen to be higher, or so you just take it for granted that longer waits must mean worse net experience?
- rawgabbit 5mo agoThe US has half the number of medical school graduates compared to the average. Instead of creating a lunar base, maybe create more residencies to graduate doctors? Quote: “…has produced one of the lowest ratios of medical school graduates, 8.6 for every 100,000 people. This is far lower than the OECD average of nearly 15 graduates per 100,000 people.”
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- neves 5mo agoThe market can't solve healthcare. It must be public. Americans shouldn't need to kill healthcare CEOs.
- warumdarum 5mo agoBut prisoners have socialized medicine?
- paulryanrogers 5mo agoNot quite. Inmates often have copays.
- goshx 5mo agoThe entire healthcare system seems to be built against the population. I've come to see healthcare providers like doctors, nurses, technicians, and the like, as a conniving, essential part of the scheme. They're incentivized to make you wait hours unnecessarily, rush every visit, and involve as many different people as possible in your care. And then, in the end, send ridiculous bills to both your insurance provider and to you at home. The person who spends the most time with you is usually the one trying to collect the payment. It's absurd. There is absolutely no reason for a doctor to make over $1000 for a 15 minute conversation. There is absolutely no reason for a medical equipment provider to bill more than the retail price of a piece of equipment, especially after insurance has already paid more than the full cost of the equipment on each installment. There is absolutely no reason for a family to receive a bill of almost one million dollars because their baby was premature and was in the NICU (see @thepasinins on instagram). There are too many layers in the system making a fortune off the public's back while adding little to no actual value.
- bryanlarsen 5mo agoThe standard GP consult fee in Ontario Canada is $77.15. (just over us$50). That's gross, the nurse, receptionist and rent have to be paid out of that. Some doctors will do 4 of those an hour, but most will do 6. And they'll try and find ways to bill additional codes above the consult.
- verzali 5mo agoCouldn't multiple doctors band together? Seems like nurses,rents, and receptionists should benefit from economies of scale.
- bryanlarsen 5mo agoThat pay scale assumes you are banding together. A typical doctor has 30-50% overhead. Without sharing nursing/receptionists/offices the overhead would likely be > 100%.
- tptacek 5mo ago
- cladopa 5mo agoThe main problem the US has is food. As a Spaniard myself, every time I go to the US it is really hard for me to eat well. Good quality food is extremely expensive and inconvenient (full of friction) compared to Japan or Europe. The solution are not better Hospitals to deal with your diabetes or cancer after all your food has sugars it should not have like corn syrup because sugar is cheap. You have so much additives in your food for preservation. Meat is full of Hormones. Antibiotics on your vegetables that destroy your microbiota. Genetically Modified to fill the fields with pesticides. Now Americans are obese as they process the growth hormones from their meat and their microbiota dies from the antibiotics they eat in their vegetables and their meat. Waiting until your children has autism or asthma or cancer is not the solution.
- 6stringmerc 5mo agoEverything you address makes sense. I’m not a Texan by birth but most of my life here, have traveled overseas, learned French language, culture, and cuisine. The issue is, unfortunately, profit drives everything here. Now it’s driving the most successful post-war boom economy into debt, because, well, Boomers. The saying is the US doesn’t have “health care” we have “sick care.” Preventing diseases? Not profitable. Giving people diseases then charging them for treatment? Profitable. Fortunately the obesity epidemic has a cliff like tail end, as those people tend to eat themselves into an early grave and lack the resources to pay to prolong their participation in Planet Earth.
- alex43578 5mo ago
- h4kunamata 5mo agoUSA population will never know peace. When basic exams cost them easily US$100k, you know the system is broken. Health system is a business model in the US, and people who are organ donor are literally being murdered to have their organs removed. Don't trust my owners, you won't need much to find that out.
- alex43578 5mo agoBasic exams cost $100K? Citation definitely needed. You either have a wild idea of “basic” or have no clue. The ACA baseline plan has to cover a yearly checkup, basic screenings for things like blood pressure and cholesterol, and even more in depth screenings like colonoscopies or pap smears; all at 0 out of pocket cost.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- b3nji 5mo agoThis doesn't ring true coming from the UK. I like in the US now and the healthcare is not comparable. The UK health care system is an absolute joke, it's a running joke among a lot of the population. It's not free for a start, the taxes the population have to pay are eye watering. You have to wait weeks, if not months for a specialist, hospital beds are few, there is no accountability for regular fuck ups (I've been on the bad end of a horrific one). The US system from what I have seen so far is a dream. It's cheaper and the service is top notch. For context I've moved from the Midlands in the UK to the Research Triangle in North Carolina.
- tptacek 5mo agoA thing people in the US have trouble keeping a bead on is that net compensation (after taxes) in Europe tends to be sharply lower in the US, so that white collar professionals with employer-provided insurance are generally coming out significantly ahead of where people in the NHS are, financially.
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoIncomes are sharply more unequal. Yes, tech professionals earn more in the USA. Plenty of people flip burgers or cut lawns, and 25 million or so can't afford health insurance. If you take any kind of look at disparities in health outcomes, it becomes immediately apparent who is dragging down the mortality statistics. This is not something espresso-drinking researchers at WHO dreamed up to fight a culture war.
- tptacek 5mo agoI'm not making an assessment of which economy or system is better. I'm saying that the modal American HN commenter would probably be significantly worse off financially in the UK NHS than on their own insurance, even factoring in how expensive insurance is.
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoYes, probably. There are plenty of comments here along the lines of "I have health insurance and lots of money, healthcare in the USA is fine".
- tptacek 5mo agoYou know you're in trouble with all these kinds of analyses when they try to square up cost of care with life expectancy. The principal components in life expectancy difference between the US and the other OECDs are car accidents, homicides, and CVD. Obviously, accidents and homicides aren't a function of the health care system; they're a function of the atypical dependence the US has on cars and its wildly atypical availability of firearms. Though: it is worth noting that the OECD definition of "preventable deaths" includes vehicular accidents! But even the CVD statistics are misleading in a comparison like this. CVD outcomes are heavily regionalized in the US. The New England states have CVD outcomes comparable to western Europe. But go to Mississippi and Alabama and we look like a developing country. There's a lot of stuff going into that difference, but the key thing here is that the structural design of the health system is the same in both regions. There's a lot not to like about the US system of employer-paid health insurance. But these kinds of critiques are frustrating and a little unserious, and it annoys me that this article assumes its readers won't dig into the crosstabs and will just take the comparison on faith. That's disrespectful to readers.
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoIf you look just at differences in treatment, ignoring preventable deaths, the disparity in mortality between the USA and other rich countries is just as evident. This is a long-standing fact. It's difficult to interpret without concluding that something is badly wrong with US healthcare provision. Plenty of people out there trying, though
- tptacek 5mo agoI don't think this is true. Check out: Causes of America’s Lagging Life Expectancy: An International Comparative Perspective (Jessica Ho); there's an amazing chart in the middle that breaks causes down between countries. This squares with a general observation about US healthcare, which is that it is expensive and overprovisioned and generally achieves marginally better outcomes for a variety of common serious conditions, which is also what you'd expect if you've had extended contact with the system.
- ViktorRay 5mo agoThere is absolutely no reason for a doctor to make over $1000 for a 15 minute conversation. No doctor makes this much for a 15 minute conversation. A small portion of that money is going to the doctor. Much of it goes to all the other aspects of healthcare. The facility, other people involved in care, etc. And no 15 minute visit costs 1000 dollars to the patient as well. That’s a pretty big exaggeration.
- beej71 5mo agoI had a 10 minute visit with an ENT in the US and they billed over $850. My insurance paid $650. I paid the rest. So it certainly didn't cost me $1000, but the numbers are impressive.
- skeledrew 5mo agoMeanwhile Cuba, a country the US is doing all it can get away with to destroy/subsume, has a stellar health-care system that's free.
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoCuba has a totalitarian government that exercises total control over the media and does not allow independent validation of its healthcare statistics. But yes, based on the unverifiable numbers put out by the state media organs, healthcare in Cuba is very good.
- weakened_malloc 5mo agoThey also only earn $50-80 per month
- timbit42 5mo agoWhether that is good or bad depends on their cost of living.
- skeledrew 5mo agoThis isn't an "according to state media" thing. I know people who have gone there for specialized care in the past (I live in Jamaica) and only had good things to say. We also had quite a few Cuban health professionals here for decades until the US forced us (and several other Caribbean countries) to end our agreement a couple months ago (news says other things of course, but none of it adds up). And I actually also know a few Cubans living there.
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoI've heard anecdotes. Diego Maradona. If it's anything like the regime Cuba is modeled on (Russia) treatment is good in the capital city where Prez lives, and non-existent in the regions.
- cosnenc 5mo agoIronic that another article posted to HN about the need for a socialist economy was flagged to oblivion. Clearly capitalism is doing a bang up job and discussion of alternatives is wholly inappropriate.
- thelastgallon 5mo agoThere is already a highly functional and efficient (socialist kind) healthcare system in US. Medicare sets prices for what they are going to pay. I don't think they negotiate. However, rest of US healthcare system is banned from using medicare system, because of structural reasons: maximize theft from population using a variety of health care organizations.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoThe study: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2026/may/us-health-care-global-perspective-2026 https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
- sssilver 5mo agoWhat little or big can I as an individual do to help improve this?
- antisthenes 5mo ago'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. The Onion article should have really been written about the Healthcare system, which every week does more damage to Americans than all of mass shootings have done in a decade. It's unfathomable what else could have been achieved with the extra 8% of GDP going towards projects that would benefit the entire nation...renewables, nuclear, grid upgrades, housing projects. Hell, even AI spending pales in comparison to these figures.
- tsoukase 5mo agoHealth care in the US is the field that functions with the ultimate values of the country: totally free market (read capitalist jungle), without any state/public support, where only the fittest literally survive. But everyone can (read hopes to) become one.
- zombot 5mo agoWho would have thought that a system as corrupt as in the US would have suboptimal results for the people it is supposed to serve. Without consumer protection laws and consequences for violations all these services are bound to degenerate into branches of organized crime.