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Comment by louison11 | Hacker News Reader

Even without insurance and without social security help, the cost of medical care in most of the world for the same services is dramatically lower. To give you an idea, I got an ECG (heart test), X-Ray and complete blood panel done at a local clinic here in Europe for 29 euros.

The key to addressing what you’re pointing at is mostly fixing the scam that US college education has become. It’s the crazy tuition that gets trickled down in the bill, and acts as a bottleneck guaranteeing scarcity of doctors and thus super high wages. A doctor in the US makes BANK, like lawyer money, not so much the case in Europe, where they’re upper class but not crazy rich.

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It’s not just the cost of college that limits the supply of doctors. There is an explicit limit on how many people can become doctors each year in the US:

http://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope-...

In addition, in many states in the US you have to get permission to open a new medical facility:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

Often the people on the board own existing medical facilities, so you literally have to get permission from your potential competition to compete with them.

https://www.justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/20...

For example from the above link:

“ In 2006, the Antitrust Division alleged that a hospital in Charleston, West Virginia used the threat of objection during the CON process, and the potential ensuing delay and cost, to induce another hospital seeking a CON for an open heart surgery program not to apply for it at a location that would have well served Charleston consumers.”

To summarize, much of the price problem could be solved within each State.

So why hasn't it been solved in the states in which this kind of stuff is a priority?

Some states have really good healthcare for the poor but even they have exorbitant costs for everyone who's too well off to quality. You'd think at least one of them would tackle this.

>>A doctor in the US makes BANK, like lawyer money,

As compared to what? someone that may or may not have gone to college, learned to code and now makes 400-700K per year working at a tech company?

I for one think doctors deserve to 'make BANK' and people creating apps to post cat or people dancing videos should make a whole lot less.

The problem in the US is far bigger than the cost of medical education.

The US doesn't have single payer healthcare. For every medical professional actually helping a patient, there's a legion of bureaucrats (administrators, insurers, accountants and lawyers, along with all their support staff) spread over a huge network of businesses adding their cut. Go to the ER and you'll be getting bills for it 2 years later. This massive overhead needs to go away to enable price transparency and reasonable costs.

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