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Comment by slantedview | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact that most Americans don't know:

We _ALREADY_ spend more than enough on healthcare as a nation to fully fund healthcare for everybody. It's just that, unlike in other countries, our current system routes that spending to various for profit entities that don't involve actually providing care.

tldr; Lack of funding is not a legitimate argument against providing healthcare to Americans.

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Doesn't that suggest health care in America is too expensive? Increasing funding to an inefficient system doesn't sound like a sustainable or extensible solution.

The inefficiency is in the private sector.

Medicare is just as expensive, and the government is what makes drugs, doctors, malpractice and opening facilities so expensive. So no.

Other governments don't have a problem making it cheaper.

You will also find other governments with public healthcare make a complete mess of itself.

What makes health care expensive in the US is not public vs private, its the regulatory framework on everything. On drugs, on hospitals, on insurance, on doctors, on malpractice, etc.

While true, in healthcare, a lot of the incentives that for-profit entities experience are put in place by the government. For example, a lot of the economics around pharma are driven by patent laws.

And who lobbied for those patent laws?

But that also means that if you could fix the cost bloat, it would be much easier to provide universal coverage, and that trying to do the latter before addressing the former is bound to fail.

Costs are high, largely, because we have a fragmented mess of a system rather than a single payer.

How do you know that that, rather than something else, accounts for the high costs?

Edit: for example, Scott Alexander's point about US providers feeling they have to provide expensive treatment just to cover the possibility of a lawsuit: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

Edit2: Also, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, and several others have typical cost savings but aren't single payer.

Costs are high for many reasons, but having for profit companies whose own overheads far exceed those of public options (such as Medicare) are the the most obvious contributor.

If private insurace cost as much as medicare you wouldnt still have rising cost of healthcare. Medicare has less admin cost but also they pay the least to providers.

I would not adovcate for public health in the us before the government fixes medicare.

> We _ALREADY_ spend more than enough on healthcare as a nation to fully fund healthcare for everybody.

I would like to see a study or article demonstrating this. Do you have any links?

https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/snapshots-healt...

http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/life-expectancy-and-u-s-heal...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-costs-how-the-us-...

The point I usually see is that the US government healthcare spending per capita is comparable that of other developed countries with universal healthcare.

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