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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Like most other for-profit enterprises, there is little incentive to maintain capacity greater than what is needed needed to handle the "average" demand. So when something exceptional happens, of course the capacity is inadequate.

You can also (likely successfully) argue that this will also happen in a government run healthcare system, but the situation has certainly not been improved by capitalism as implemented in the US.

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Oh, it definitely happens in government-run healthcare systems. Remember how proponents of single-payer government healthcare in the US used to point to the amount of money that the UK spends on the NHS and argue that the US would save money by switching? One of the ways the NHS keeps costs down is by not maintaining excess capacity, meaning that even a moderately bad flu season is a major struggle.

Doesn't that apply to for-profit hospitals as well? In both cases, there is an incentive to avoid paying for excess capacity.

The cost advantage of a single-payer system is in larger negotiation. A single person has no leverage at all in negotiating with a hospital. An insurance network has some leverage when negotiating with hospitals, but results in user-complexity trying to navigate the in-network and out-of-network agreements. A single-payer has a large amount of leverage when negotiating with hospitals, and can avoid price gouging from manufacturers.

What data we have indicates that the US is going to have by far the largest outbreak of COVID-19 in the world, larger even than in China, a country with something like four times our population. So the unique way we do healthcare here is not looking particularly good.

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