In other words you can have a system which prioritizes profit, or you can have a system that prioritizes care. But you can't prioritize both.
There's always some kind of rationing of the limited resource. There it's based in large part on you or your insurance's ability to pay. Here it's based on how much the government/taxpayer is willing to shell out.
If one party gets elected on the promise of lower taxes and lower spending, then the people cannot complain when there is lower spending. If the spending gets too low, and health, education, housing, and infrastructure start creaking, well, who's to blame for that?
What we need is something that looks at that efficiency-care-quality tradeoff curve and finds something like the markowitz efficient frontier. Now.. that hospitals operate at such efficiency ought to be a consequent of capitalistic competition even in a for-profit context. The american health system is so crooked and bureaucratic and overpriced, perhaps the most we can do is demand our hospitals be non-profits. Many "non-profit" hospitals seemingly have megabooms in growth, which makes me wonder where the money is coming from to fund the growth, if not profit.
Equally it does not mean unlimited resources. Clearly we live in a real world, and Healthcare will always be resource constrained to some degree.
Those who allocate resources still decide priorities, and clearly health becomes balanced with education, justice, military and so on.
So perhaps in deciding between for-profit and non-profit it's really a decision between who gets to allocate the resources. Do we prefer people out to squeeze every last dime out of you, or people looking to get re-elected by their constituents?
Quality of life while undergoing treatment is also entirely non-existent, trust me, you to not want to be "immortal" if it required indefinite ECMO. Unless you enjoy living in hospitals I guess.
Polite? I cannot day
Obviously true, but