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Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

Please define "wildly dysfunctional".

How abvout this graph: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/healthcare-spending-a...

Just about every other rich country spends less per person on healthcare than the USA (typically about half), and the people live longer. The Japanese, the longest-lived large country in the world, spend about a third per person of what the USA does.

Clearly dysfunctional. "Wildly"? That's a matter for debate.

Graphs like that might actually say something if they included a "lifestyle" axis and a "uses car insurance for oil changes" axis, as munctional puts it.

I recently had a physical therapist look at my 6 month old daughter at G'town hospital in DC for a routine checkup. Before I could see the therapist for a half-hour session I had to interact with 4 different people and sign so much paperwork that I felt like I was buying a house.

The system is broken.

People call it "dysfunctional" because they conflate the "insurance industry" with the "healthcare indsutry". What exists in the American private sector is not, by any means, a healthcare industry. It is merely an insurance industry. By insurance industry standards, it functions well. By healthcare standards, it's terrifically broken.

The way we use health insurance nowadays is akin to using your car insurance for oil changes and checkups.

Bollocks. I use my health insurance (publicly funded - I'm Canadian) for oil changes and checkups, and Canada still manages to spend about half, per capita, on health coverage as the US.

Not only that, but most employers offer supplementary insurance of one form or another to provide for the things not covered by public insurance. Because they don't have to worry about most of the Big Things (except dental and usually optometric), it's far easier and cheaper for them to offer some of the smaller things (massage, orthotics, etc.).

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