And already, US healthcare spending is at least twice that of other developed countries, at arguably much reduced availability to the average American.
as an outsider, the inability of the USA to change its healthcare system is baffling.
But on the insurance side, it has come to more closely resemble a legalized protection racket. You never know what it's going to actually cost you, you and your family members can be "hung out over a bridge" by the system, and when you really need the protection, the system decides what is protection and how much you can have. It needs to end. It's hollowing out the vitality of the country in its increasing conflict-of-mission.
I'm not saying the US is perfect, but it does have some benefits other countries do not.
The US in finances provides 60% of the worlds medical research. We produce 40% of the worlds medical journals, and research.
People bitch about the United States healthcare being this or that. But what they’re really saying is our healthcare is too expensive, bloated in cost, and inaccessible to lower income and at risk individuals. Which I would agree.
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
It’s a textbook tragedy of the commons example.
Maybe I'm dense but it sounds a lot less like many commoners taking advantage of a common shared resource to the point of destruction. More like "corporate socialism", "regulatory capture", or "corruption"
then you have most fulltime employees getting insurance through their employer. even the ones on shitty plans are somewhat protected from seeing the full costs because the employer doesn't usually disclose their share of premiums. I have a decent high-deductible plan that I pay zero premiums for; I have literally no idea how much it costs and no real way to find out (short of harassing our benefits manager).
on top of this, you have the powerful institutions/individuals who are making real money of the situation and lobby to perpetuate it. the small subset of the population that isn't more or less apathetic faces an uphill battle to change anything.
It's not tragedy of the commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
This is an example of an inefficient system with powerful stakeholders working to preserve the gravy train that's developed around it.
Perhaps the better public policy jargon to use would be logic of collective action, in the sense that the profiteers are the special interest group and the rest of us are the diffuse group, but the concepts are pretty conceptually related in my opinion.