Healthcare was more affordable back when individuals payed for it.
The problem was that some could not, so we introduced insurance.
At this point no one can afford it anymore without insurance. So our fix for one problem created a new problem.
The problem was that some could not, so we introduced insurance.
At this point no one can afford it anymore without insurance. So our fix for one problem created a new problem.
And then there is healthcare, like diabetes, hypertension, stroke, obesity, heart disease, arthritis, old age, and end of life care.
The former is an insurable event, with low probability and relatively small costs.
The latter is inevitable and basically not insurable at any price that 95% of people can afford.
The question is really how much of society’s resources does society want to go towards those chronic and old age issues, because there can be almost infinite demand for more and more resources.
Government and private insurance raises prices.
Cash excludes poor people.
To be brutal about this: we in the U.S. demonstrably pay more per person that the rest of the "developed" world, and we get worse outcomes for it, and that is not even counting that we exclude a good portion of our population (which other countries do not).
The only place the U.S. excels is at the very top of healthcare, the part that 1% of our population will ever see. We pay the top doctors the top dollar, so they come here, where they charge uber-top-dollar. At one point a lot of this was going to fund new drugs and clinical methods, which quickly filtered down to help everyone. But at this point those filter-downs are few and far between, and it is simply going to those who have the most money, or are the most visible.
> we in the U.S. demonstrably pay more per person that the rest of the "developed" world
It's possible both of these can be true. Government ownership increases prices and we happen to be towards the worst end of the spectrum in terms of real overhead by such a system.
"Top 10 Countries Where Insulin is Most Expensive (2018 RAND Corporation)[1]:
United States — $98.70
Chile — $21.48
Mexico — $16.48
Japan — $14.40
Switzerland — $12.46
Canada — $12.00
Germany — $11.00
Korea — $10.30
Luxembourg — $10.15
Italy — $10.03Maybe government run healthcare is more expensive than (something) but your "both sides are bad" is missing how unbalanced the sides are.
"In 2016, the U.S. spent nearly twice as much on health care as other high-income countries, yet had poorer population health outcomes. [...] Using international data primarily from 2013 to 2016, the researchers compared the U.S. with 10 other high-income countries — the U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland — on approximately 100 metrics that underpin health care spending. The study confirmed that the U.S. has substantially higher spending, worse population health outcomes, and worse access to care than other wealthy countries. [...] Life expectancy in the U.S. was the lowest of all 11 countries in the study, at 78.8 years; [...] the proportion of the U.S. population with health insurance was 90 percent, lower than all the other countries, which ranged from 99 to 100 percent coverage.
For several commonly used brand-name pharmaceuticals, the U.S. had substantially higher prices than other countries, often double the next-highest price." - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/u-s-pays-more...
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...
Perhaps the advent of insurance helped bring more advanced and therefor better medical care to the average person that would otherwise be unaffordable.