While potentially true (it's hard to say given US healthcare 1. produces much of the innovation that the rest of the world utilizes at subsidized rates and 2. provides more capital-intensive services per capita, and most healthcare is provided toward the end of life when much of it is futile), all developed nation healthcare systems have performed absolutely terribly over the last 50 years and just because some have performed less poorly doesn't mean that they're the ideal solution.
We should look back to a time before national one-size-fits-all healthcare regulations that, based on crude generalizations, regiment a complex industry at great cost to innovation, and monolithic central-government-administered programs with no end user price incentives.
We are overpaying for everything because healthcare should not be a for profit venture the government needs to step in and set a max profit of say 5%. Also we're paying for a lot of bad habits like overeating and not exercising. Lots of preventable diseases go into that mix, I dare say it's the majority of expenditures. There is virtually no governmental or social efforts being put into stopping those preventable diseases.
It's much more complicated than that. For one, healthcare gets more expensive with per capita GDP. This is the pattern across the developed world. Healthcare spending in the US is about where you would expect based on this pattern, given US per capita GDP is significantly higher than that of most developed countries. Medicare in the US is similarly much more expensive than comparable programs. For another, there are things the US does better than other countries, like treat heart disease and cancer.
Also like I said, other countries get to utilize medical innovation produced in the US at subsidized rates.
And yes, for-profit healthcare should be allowed. Healthcare workers aren't all volunteers. They're doing it for money. The same applies to investors. Having laws limiting investment to philanthropy and taxpayers is totally destructive.
Healthcare costs are going down in cosmetic surgery, unlike other healthcare fields across the developed world. Cosmetic surgery is driven by price conscious consumers and profit-motivated practitioners. Self-interest is a powerful motivator and ignoring that leads to misguided bans on for-profit healthcare and inefficient, rent-seeking government-run healthcare bureaucracies and government-permissioned private industries shielded from competition by regulatory barriers.
>>Also we're paying for a lot of bad habits like overeating and not exercising. Lots of preventable diseases go into that mix, I dare say it's the majority of expenditures. There is virtually no governmental or social efforts being put into stopping those preventable diseases.
Agreed. I think health outcomes are mostly a result of non-healthcare factors. Having safer, denser and more pedestrian friendly cities would go a long way in improving health for example.
We should look back to a time before national one-size-fits-all healthcare regulations that, based on crude generalizations, regiment a complex industry at great cost to innovation, and monolithic central-government-administered programs with no end user price incentives.