in case you’ve not gotten the memo, the entire world has been telling you for more than fifty years that under your shitty model you pay more for worse results.
It doesn’t take a genius to see how retarded the way you’re doing things is.
Retarded? You obviously don’t understand that it is working perfectly and exactly as intended. Only, it is not a system to maintain the health of the average citizen, it is instead a system to siphon as much wealth from the regular people as possible towards the few corporate entities who managed to buy themselves the monopoly to exploit the poorer castes and drain any poor fuck who needs medical assistance dry for all they’re worth.
The average American is prey, but there are enough reserves of these human resources to simply not care that it’s either bankruptcy or death in the average case of a medical emergency.
I mean the US healthcare market has huge amounts of regulatory and liceance capture that makes for free market healthcare impossible in the states. Its also, because of this subsidized a lot but practically forbidden to be efficient (because most of the industry is ran by for profit).
Kind of worst case of government stepping in only to prevent meaningful markets but not to support people in need (not to say Medicare and medicaid don’t help some, they are the better example IMHO even if they pay out so bad most places practically refuse to take it).
A free market is probably necessary. With a system where everyone has enough to live well, affordable healthcare, equal treatment etc.
A free market ensures a lot of quality standards.
But it is not only competition, improvements and “getting the best, the best way”.
It is “making & selling something that people buy, the cheap way”. This principle is fundamentally flawed, as environmental protection doesnt pay, and there is no real reason for companies to be good for the enviroment. Like, actually being good.
You can also argue that products enshittified over time (glued together laptops, unnecessarily weak drinking glasses, “IOT-ifying” everything, cheap clothes, throwaway razors, cheap food,…) because there is no value in making good products in a free market, if people get f**ing brainwashed and dont buy stuff based on their value over time.
And equally it is even worse with the environment. As there is no value in protecting the environment, nobody does it. Now laws force companies to list all important data, and this gets converted into some indirect form of money. But not nearly as transparently and freely as a free market. You may get fees or not, you may save some “carbon credits” but these are horrendously underpriced and can be bought with neocolonial freakshows like forcing people out of their own land, to “protect it”, as if it would have been destroyed before.
And the main flaw is that there is no big reason to not fake these values. Or not just write down what you already do, and keep it at this. Or do more than needed.
And to the topic, a free market has no stop sign. Companies naturally grow bigger and bigger, get more and more efficient, critical for whole societies that rely on working for them, and thus they are inherently not “neutral possibilities in a free world”.
This always leads to huge mega-giants having influence on people, politics etc.
And this leads us to the situation we are currently in. Companies abusing license and patent laws, to cripple the system that even made them possible.
I have no idea why the US is so f**cked up in this graph, but believe me Germany is also horrible.
Trickle down economics does work in a way that ensures basic healthcare for all germans. But meanwhile these damn germans produce a SH**LOAD of stuff.
I have no numbers but it is insane how much utter garbage we produce. And from this endless, insane stream of trash, we always scoop off enough profit to make the 1% even more ugly rich, and keep the said basic human rights intact.
This may work, but it is soooo far from sufficiency.
From facts. German healthcare system is 100% privatised and it works very well due to minimal market regulations, but extensive safety regulation. The US healthcare system is bound to insane licensing processes and fees, yet close to zero safety regulations.
For example, the US only has a few medical air transport companies, because getting a license is very very expensive. Only big corps can afford it and they have a cartel like grip on the market as there’s no competition. At the same time the US doesn’t regulate their performance and pricing. So you end up with an artificial cartel monopoly which sets sky high prices for their services.
Similar licensing in Germany is much cheaper and any decent air company can afford it, so there’s a lot of healthy competition. But they also have price caps, so services are actually affordable.
So, in short the difference is that Germany has a free market with pro-consumer regulations and the US has cartel monopoly without any pro-consumer regulations at all. And this approach goes through the whole healthcare system.
The free market always sorts itself out, especially with a small nudge from the state, that’s why US corporations are lobbying hard to prevent all and any competition to themselves. And that’s why corporate lobbying is called corruption elsewhere and is illegal.
This differentiation between weird license fees and safety regulations makes sense.
But the privatised hospitals etc is extremely problematic, as they underpay their stuff regularily, causing extreme situations.
I guess that a free market has advantages over slow and established monopoles. But the companies will still exploit as much as possible, if not every single thing is regulated.
Example environment and labor laws. If you have exact laws for every known process, they will try to find loopholes to be cheaper, because there is only profit, no moral.
If you want more fun info: if you move abroad you still owe Medicare & Medicaid, the national healthcare plan. Neither of these can you get an tax exemption, reimbursement, or a voucher to use in another country even if you haven’t stepped foot on US territory in decades. You will pay into these services your whole life if you have a passport to that shitty system & never get anything in return unless you fly to the US to have a procedure that will cost more than it does in the country you might be living in (even without insurance).
During COVID when Sleepy Joe Biden promised vaccines for all Americans that want vaccines, the health minister had to step in when asked to clarify that historically the US does not help its citizens abroad & to go ask the host country instead–or to get on a plane, in a pandemic, quarantining both ways, if you want a shot. The cherry on top was sending vaccines aboard for political favors & if you asked if the embassy if any of those will be used for citizens abroad to be told these were for diplomatic purposes only (meanwhile France & China sent its citizens shots).
That’s average. So if you have a lot of money and are spending it to raise the average cost, you probably live as long or longer than the other countries. On the other hand, the poors have a live expectancy that much lower to average it out. So call it 70 for the poors and 82 for the rich.
Turns out it seems the Australians have public health insurance for everyone - Medicare. And you have optional additional private insurance. Communism I guess. Surely wouldn’t workout for the US…
Turns out it seems the Australians have public health insurance for everyone - Medicare.
To follow from your comment , because Australia has a publicly funded health system, the government actively works to reduce preventable diseases because it reduces the load on the system.
So they have had:
A sunscreen campaign and skin cancer check initiatives since the '80s.
Anti-smoking campaigns (and high tobacco taxes) where resources are available to help quit.
Every citizen gets a free bowel cancer test mailed to them when they turn 50 to help find and treat cancer earlier.
Road safety laws are tight and helmet / seatbelt regulations are strict as it reduces hospital loads.
Vaccinations for a multitude of easily preventable diseases are given for free in childhood, particularly now for the virus that causes cervical cancer.
Those and a myriad of other public health initiatives all help Australians to live longer.
Coupled with the fact that the cost for the whole population is borne by an income tax of approximately 2% , it means that if you are poor or unemployed, you still have access to health services. That also means that small health issues among low income earners don’t snowball until they are life threatening.
It has the knock on effect that people don’t end up trapped in a job because it offers “good benefits and a low deductible” and concerns about pre existing conditions interfering with insurance and etc when changing jobs is generally moot.
Then throw in mandatory government regulated retirement funds that require all employers to put in 12+ percent of an employee’s gross earnings into an employee’s fund of their choosing for their retirement. That coupled with public health generally means the whole US style worker=slave arrangement can’t exist.
Which means the US will get nothing like this as all that screams of nanny state overlords and death panels and moar taxes killing freedom and so on and so forth. Sorry guys.
I mean… there is a LOT broken with the healthcare system in the US that you all know. However, in the US -granted you have the dime- you can get the best care in the world. If you can pay for that. If you have been to a hospital in the UK and to one in the US… you will exactly know what I mean.
However, this specific graphic shows that there are likely other contributors for higher life-expectancy than only professional/paid healthcare. E.g. lifestyle aspects like dietary consideration (Italy, Japan…).
Does not mean, that there is no need to fix the System.
Sure, it is just not as one dimensional as this cherry picked graphic implies. Education is also a likely contributor.
The optimization would be : cost low, life expectancy at max… however… it is not that easy… ‚Let’s Just copy the system of Japan‘ just would not work… or maybe it would!
However, best healthcare will not help you if have a unhealthy lifestyle which is known to be a common issue in the US especially. Not sure how it is about Australia though!
UK hospitals have been excellent in my experience, though I’ve obviously only seen some of them.
Plus, although our system is very different from America in theory, our government has, for decades (especially under the Conservative Party), been undermining the NHS through cuts, market-based policy decisions and creeping attempts at privatisation.
If the NHS was supported the way it deserves to be, it would be even better than it already is.
NHS underfunding is notorious. Not sure how situation has developed but I have seen quite some hospitals in the UK until 2016… Cannot really imagine it developed to the better. All the worst compared to continental Europe. And the few ones I saw in the US where excellent too. Of course some are exceptional in the UK. Not sure how situation has changed since 2016 though.
You just don’t realize what the market has solved for. It didn’t solve the problem of expensive healthcare, it solved the problem of how to maximize profits for the wealthy.
That’s what people don’t understand about “the market”. What you think it’s doing isn’t what it’s actually doing.
Yup, the free market and health care are not compatible because the free market works on principles of supply and demand. But when you have a limited resource that people will literally pay anything for (their health) - well you can see where the problem is.
Everybody knows this. You don’t have to state it so pretentiously like you’re the only jerk who knows it. It’s been said on the internet billions of times for 2 decades at least.
If the free market had any real competitors, the problem would genuinely solve itself in favor of the consumer. We see this with any new tech where a bunch of new firms try to win customers by any means necessary in those first few years.
The problem as always is: where are the competitors after X years, and are these “competitors” actually competing anymore?
The solution as always is: regulate. Ensure competition. Ensure cartels aren’t price fixing. But no one wants to hear that
I want to hear it. I want to hear it in my music. My daily discussions. My podcasts. On my television. In my social media. I cannot hear it enough. It’s gives a joyous and wonderful feeling.
By the time the system has consolidated enough that there is little effective competition, those companies have also become so large that they can lobby for regulatory capture. It’s not zero regulation, but rather a form of regulation that solidifies their position while still providing the same shitty service they always have.
Regulation won’t work. The system is too far gone.
The streaming market has tons of competition. So then why are prices endlessly rising and content being removed and the value being made worse with ads?
The video game market also has tons of companies in it, and yet most of them are making the experience worse with ads and service-based games.
I’m so old I used to install my games on 5 1/2" floppies. I dispise how the video game market changed from an ownership model to service-based and micro transactions models that are popular today. Don’t even get me started on mobile games. What I have noticed is that I am paying almost the same price for a video game today as I was 30 years ago. A game that I paid approximately $75 for in 1994 I should be paying approximately $150.00 for a new release today. Yet I’m still paying $75 for a game, they have to be making up that difference somewhere. Now the tools needed to make a game have had an enormous impact on reducing costs, and there’s a whole bunch of other economic stuff I’m ignoring. Regardless, it’s still kind of amazing the price of games hasn’t inflated.
I have an honors minor in medical humanities and took several medical policy courses. We looked at this exact graph from previous years as well as several other huge sets of data/graphs/studies and anything else related to insurance you can imagine. Insurance is not a standard market commodity and does not follow the same trend or logic. The only way you can lower premiums in insurance is by reducing the risk in the pool, or increasing the pool size to dilute the risk. This is either increasing the total pool size by increasing premiums, getting more people, or being selective about who joins the risk pool. The third one was what was called “preexisting conditions” and kept high cost people from entering the risk pool and draining the funds. This got banned and increased premiums. By increasing competition you end up splitting up the pools, making everyone’s premiums go up. This happened multiple times post ACA after the GOP started stripping out the funding and safeguards to prevent this. More and more competition opened up with artificially low premiums being subsidized by federal dollars, but then when the subsidies ended the premiums started jumping. Then when the premiums were jumping, new companies opened up to make more competition advertising lower rates, but then further fractured to pool sizes, leading to premiums skyrocketing. If you look back just 10 years ago there was a 3-5 year stretch of premiums increasing almost 30% year after year. It was due to all the competition opening up every year. This is why single payer systems have the lowest rates. If you have even one private company monopoly with a regulated cap on profits you would still end up with lower premiums. Then, if this single paying company was nationalized to take out the profit making middle man, the premiums are that much lower because your risk is spread across a massive pool. More competition in insurance makes the problem worse. I would agree with your stronger regulation though. There is a lot that can be done there.
I would really like to know how this graph was generated, because some expenditure per capita values have three different corresponding life expectancy values. Just look at Spain for example.
The people worried about “losing an election” are paid by the people who profit from the broken system. The communism fear is a strawman that liberals use to excuse their worthless party.
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