That's nuts in 2018 in a wealthy democracy.
Think about how cuba is able to have similar life expectancy, etc at a fraction of the cost with chronic shortages and subpar sanitation. Most likely there are many medical procedures doing at best nothing for the patient except draining their wallets.
Worse, it could be that treatment 1 for problem A causes problem B which leads to treatment 2, etc, etc for some moderate benefit at great cost over just dealing with problem A.
Worst, it could be the medical treatments are having a net negative effect on people's health. Eg, those studies that estimate hospital errors (not even just death from dangerous treatments applied as standard) are the third leading cause of death in the US.
I suspect most of the US' problems is the atrocious lifestyle most live; overeating and under-exercising are literally a lethal combination.
I would post a pubmed link but sorry, youll have to just try it yourself and read blogs because the medical researchers still haven't caught up to this. They are still calling a 30% carb diet "low carb".
Treating complex conditions (like cancer) is exactly where the US excels, compared to other countries. Yes, it's expensive, but the alternative is, well, dying.
Since the grandparent mentioned the UK specifically, I'll point out that the US has dramatically higher survival rates for treatable forms of cancer than the UK does. For prostate cancer - generally one of the most treatable forms of cancer, if treated properly - people in the US have over a 90% chance of survival[0]. The UK, on the other hand, has absolutely abysmal surival rates - second-worst of all OECD countries, and a mortality-to-incidence ratio that's almost twice what you see in the US.
Yes, the US could do a better job at making that top-of-the-line care accessible to more people, but even then, the baseline care for complex treatments specifically is actually much higher than what the UK provides.
[0] That's over the entire population, so it's including people who are uninsured and can't afford the most expensive treatments.
Perhaps there is a tradeoff between treatment of complex conditions, and treatment of more frequent but less complex conditions?
However I am specifically a proponent of voluntary collectives for things, as government forced cooperation seems suboptimal and fragile to me.
And isn't voluntary collective healthcare just another way to describe private insurance companies, especially HMO's?
Isn't this the exact thing insurance solves, in particular catastrophic coverage insurance? Nobody really gets "ruined" by paying out of pocket for one X-ray and two aspirin.
The problem is that the insurance is so expensive some people can't afford it. But the only sense in which single payer would "fix" the high cost/overhead/waste problem is by de facto regulating prices, which can be done even without it but which has a lot of obvious problems -- if the regulator chooses too high a price then it's still wasteful/unaffordable but too low and there will be no providers (or the providers will sacrifice quality to hit the regulated price).
What we need is a real solution to cost disease, which probably has something to do with reducing the regulatory compliance costs so there will be less overhead and more viable competing providers, requiring price transparency from providers, and then having people pay out of pocket for all non-catastrophic care so the patient has the incentive to decline treatment or find a less expensive provider when the treatment is unnecessary or overpriced.
This is why there are regulations to ensure a minimum standard of care. Above that, the provider is the one who has to convince the patient that their service provides some benefit over the lowest cost provider.
Chapter 7 bankruptcy (?) is probably the only way forward for most folks after a certain point.
I’m not sure what I’d do if I was presented with a $150k bill for snake bite. https://www.wideopencountry.com/actual-cost-rattlesnake-bite...
I’m fairly sure the US health system is broken, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/09/the-c...
The prices aren’t even related to cost of materials or time or even linked to inflation. Maybe patents or research costs are included, maybe not. It’s all a game between hospitals and financial companies.
Sort of like student loans...