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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

Hey - when we rely on money as the motivator for healthcare and assume the "market will fix it" this is what we get.

The market fixed it. It just fixed it in a way that most people would consider immoral.

The market would have fixed this, or at least made it suck a lot less, if it weren't for a very strong regulatory capture, certificates of need for hospitals, regulatory bottlenecks to creating doctors, etc, etc.

Notice how the dental industry doesn't have nearly the same problems even if you control for the scope of the work they do.

Americans have a higher than normal instance of late life dental issues because nobody ever actually pays to go to the dentist before they're thirty. Most employee healthcare doesn't significantly cover dental and paying out of pocket is unreasonable - this is much the same for the vision market.

The problem is we don’t let the market fix it. Instead we continue to pile on regulations that decentivize competition for better health outcomes. Blame the socialist democrats and conservatives that continue to strengthen the monopolies on healthcare because there’s no question about it, too much regulation is the culprit

I'd hardly call the current American system Free. The market responded to the [ridiculous] capricious regulations. You get what you ask for.

Oh - that's a new one. It's essentially the "there's never been a true communist government" argument but the other way around. Canada has more regulations than the US and my stepson has extremely special health needs - there have been times we've been nervous that no health agency will cover them but thankfully, so far, that's never happened. The instance where he was truly up a creek the hospital holding him simply refused to release him due to the lack of available care.

Nots not about "true this" or "true that". Incentives are real. Hospitals have real costs. Doctors want real wages. Electricity costs money. Machines cost money. Land costs money. To cover these costs, you must have income. Manipulate how income can be received, or manipulate how costs must be bared. But these don't change the fact that healthcare has costs.

You can argue that one particular system has better trade-offs than another. But that is based on your incentives. We, as consumers, want the best healthcare for free right now. Consumers and providers must meet in the middle somewhere. However, if government eliminates meeting places on the map, you can expect non-optimal locations.

No one is arguing that healthcare doesn’t have costs. But healthcare in the U.S. costs a lot more than in other places, and the reason it costs so much is that we allow doctors, hospitals, and pharma companies to exploit the vulnerable for profit. The machines and drugs are the same across the world, but we pay a ridiculous markup so doctors and execs can earn 500k+ a year. 25% of U.S. GDP is spent on healthcare. Think about how insane that is: one out of every four dollars of economic activity is spent on healthcare.

American Healthcare is visibly expensive. Other countries hide their expenses in taxes. Further, where is most healthcare innovation? that has costs as well. I'm not defending the current American model as it has many features which make things worse (from my perspective).

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