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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

I think the opioid crisis is more the problem than "inefficient healthcare"[1]

Inefficient healthcare sounds like it's just that ambulance transit times are too long or that there's too much paperwork. It doesn't bring to mind "pharma companies getting consumers addicted to opioids later triggering a massive addiction crisis that nobody is equipped or prepared to tackle"

[1] http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/49/1/1....

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I think the opioid crisis and the structural inefficiencies of the healthcare system are 2 separate (but related) problems that both need solving.

They definitely are, but I'm replying to the idea that the drop in life expectancy is because of inefficiencies - the us system has always been pretty inefficient and nothing there has changed in a way that would trigger a decrease in expectancy as far as I know. This current decrease in life expectancy seems to be linked to the ongoing opiod crisis, not a sudden decrease in health delivery efficiency

The number of uninsured people has been climbing the past few years and the expense of healthcare has continued to grow in relation to inflation.

Those are two factors that drive down life expectancy

Life expectancy started to drop in 2015, right as the uninsured rate reached its all-time low. They numbers don’t correlate. It might track to the increased cost of coverage and care, but not the uninsured rate.

They're both symptoms of the true underlying problem, which is that the system is more about corporate profits than about making people healthy.

It is probably some mix of opioids, long term impacts of continual growth in the obesity rate, and the fact that a lot of people now have health insurance with $8,000+ deductibles. These are all fixable problems.

There are fundamental problems with the most popular and attempted solutions. Opioid deaths ballooned when high-dosage users had the prescriptions/sources pulled abruptly, overweight Americans have been deluged by misleading and conflicting advice for decades, and every political party's proposal for healthcare is to just spend more money on it (differing on where exactly the funds will come from.) We need new ideas, not re-attempts of the old and failed ones.

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