edit: an explanation; Activists never demand cheaper (or more transparent) health care. They demand state to pay for it! Same as with student loans.
Or you could scrutinize the projected numbers, which conclude that it would be less expensive, in terms of government healthcare funding, to eliminate all of the ravenous middlemen causing all of the costs.
Kinda like how it'd be cheaper to just give all the homeless people housing, rather than burn shitloads of social and criminal justice funding to keep them on the streets.
These are ideological positions, though, so good luck changing any of them. So are the rolling presses -- they're not there to prop up a healthcare system, they're there to refill the troughs of irresponsible rich people whose enterprises have become "too big to fail". The problem is that the rich people have come to expect this windfall. Maybe we can save some money for them by cleaning up the healthcare and criminal justice systems!!
Because of how hamstrung Medicare and Medicaid are - with laws restricting them from leveraging their size properly in negotiations, Medicare and Medicaid combined cost US taxpayers as much per taxpayer as the NHS costs per UK taxpayer.
The big difference, of course, being that this buys us universal coverage in the UK, while Medicaid and Medicare only covers a portion of the US population. So the cost per recipient of care is many times higher.
Then a whole lot of Americans have to pay again in private insurance to actually get cover.
So for a start, Americans ought to campaign to unshackle Medicare. Remove the regulations preventing it from leveraging its size fully and make it subject to pressure to be cost effective, and put the savings into expanding coverage, and you'd already be a huge step closer to solving the problem.
EDIT: This is an interesting read: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/explainer/2021... " As proposed in H.R. 3, drug pricing negotiation would reduce federal spending by $456 billion and increase revenues by $45 billion over 10 years." -- this is a plan that still puts lots of restrictions on how hard Medicare can negotiate. Also: https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/whats-the-latest-on...
or all other not poverty stricken countries https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/poverty-world-map-142d.jpg
As someone who hails from a place whose enormous single-bloc healthcare system can dictate the terms you're describing, I don't think that statement is the explanatory gotcha you intend it to be. Those regulations are there for a reason -- to ensure your for-profit healthcare system makes profit. What if the middlemen were gone and it didn't have to?
Furthermore, the reason that these prices can be charged is the regulatory moat, courtesy of the government. Suppose that same government would enact a single-payer system, what makes you believe it wouldn't pay outrageous drug prices, courtesy of the taxpayer? The mechanism that gives the pharma lobby free reign won't just disappear over night.
"Aw, it's not so bad!"
>Furthermore, the reason that these prices can be charged is the regulatory moat, courtesy of the government. Suppose that same government would enact a single-payer system, what makes you believe it wouldn't pay outrageous drug prices, courtesy of the taxpayer? The mechanism that gives the pharma lobby free reign won't just disappear over night.
"But also it's super bad, and it's obviously the best we can do."
Don't know what to tell you -- seemed to work everywhere else. I guess that's American exceptionalism for you!
I didn't say that, but it might actually be true. Having the same people that created the current system design a single-payer system or attempt price fixing is unlikely to lead to a better outcome.
Activists never demand cheaper (or more transparent) health care. They demand state to pay for it!
...it's cheaper that way. That's-- that's why they say that. You can keep repeating yourself, but tell me, what makes almost every other first-world country better at this than the States? How is it that we can pay so much less and have, in aggregate, better health outcomes? It's a mystery!
My country has public health insurance, but gov also works hard to keep costs down. If we paid for drugs like this, the public system would bankrupt.
but imagine how much easier it would be to start a business if you didn't need to be a wage slave for the man to insure your family