> isn’t health care the kind of thing you want commoditized
No? I want it separated from employment and universally and freely available like the rest of the developed world.
(At half our costs, and similar outcomes!)
No? I want it separated from employment and universally and freely available like the rest of the developed world.
(At half our costs, and similar outcomes!)
The next day I was on a flight from SFO to Singapore, and it was extremely apparent I had strep. Upon landing in Singapore, I went to a clinic where they diagnosed the strep, gave me antibiotics, decongestants, sudafed (the good kind), throat lozenges, and ibuprofen. Total cost? $20 USD.
But I don't see the US government being able to do anything serious in the near term, with the forces of overpowered lobbying and general insanity working against it.
Sorry, I’m not following.
So under that definition what you’re describing isn’t relevant to whether it’s a commodity or not.
Also, health care isn’t a commodity right now but I’d argue it should be (a high quality one).
Different hospitals have different facilities as well. You’re better off having a type of procedure at one place than another for example. And even if you somehow made it so every hospital had the same high quality equipment you still wouldn’t have the same quality of specialists, surgeons, etc. This matters a lot.
There’s probably a baseline we could get to but the experience will never be a commodity overall.
But for more common things like an annual wellness exam, or blood tests, mending a broken arm, treating the flu, or even doing surgery on a burst appendix, those are things that I think can reasonable be commoditized across any healthcare providers.
Water, for example, is a commodity. It doesn't matter where you get it, because water from one tap is mostly indistinguishable to water from a different tap. When you need water, you simply just go to the closest tap and you can be happy that you're getting the same quality water as anywhere else. That's exactly what you want with healthcare, too.
In fact, commoditization of healthcare is probably one of the best steps towards making it a public utility. So if that's what you want, then you probably do want healthcare to be commoditized.
Amazon Care does not provide emergency surgery at the moment.
Health care is far more than just emergency services.
In the US, most health plans include co-pays for various services, annual deductibles that delay the point that the insurance actually starts paying for things, and lifetime limits on the total amount the insurance can be required to pay. So people in the US usually have incentives to avoid using medical services unless they absolutely must. These incentives magically morph otherwise reasonable insurance plans into rather expensive versions of catastrophic insurance plans with a prescription benefit.
We’ve picked the worst of each approach in the US and combined them.