The human mind loves clear enemies but Hanlon’s Razor almost always applies. Almost no one ever actually has malicious intent, but our brain evolved to watch for enemies and loves seeing patterns where they aren’t.
Sorry if some of us, in our biased minds, suspect that some of that money is spent in cigars and expensive suits.
(1) - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?most_...
So what you're saying is there is an horrendous creeping bueaucracy cost here.
Funny, because that's exactly what free market proponents argue is the cause of inefficiency in publicly managed healthcare systems, and the reason to move towards models based on the US system.
Someone is lying.
But wait, the financing in the U.S. is quite predatory, so a lot of people pay nothing, and a few people are stuck with outrageous bills. It's like the infamous SF General Hospital that offered loads of free care to the poor and to immigrants and then refused to take any insurance so that normal people were regularly driven to bankruptcy if the ambulence took them there. The U.S. healthcare is one in which a half a million is spent on emergency care for an indigent person and 10 middle class families lose their life savings of 50K treating snakebites and broken arms.
Once you wrap your head around this, you'll understand we have a very similar problem in higher education, and for very similar reasons.
All I know is simpler systems around the world exist and work such that those 10 middle class families would never get stiffed like that, whilst also looking after the needy.
I can't fathom it.
Agreed. But that's the way it is, and it's important to understand why it's this way.
When Europe and Australia adopted national healthcare systems, the industry was ~3-5% of GDP. So at that point it wasn't politically strong enough to resist either nationalization or strict controls.
Then healthcare mushroomed in size, being ~10% of GDP in Europe and 20% of GDP in the U.S.
So now, when you try to do the politics that the europeans did, it doesn't work. The industry is too powerful. Merely blaming the US for not doing what Europe did misses this essential point.
There are millions of nurses, lab techs, administrators, and doctors, and they have money and they vote. So the left keeps looking for some villain -- greedy insurance executives, Wall Street, Evil Billionaires, etc. And basically refuses to understand that these are not the ones standing in the way of reform. It's the 13% of our labor force that earns 20% of national income, and these are not the same easy targets that the left can attack, because they are a large portion of the US middle class, and are core Democratic constituencies.
That's why healthcare reform in the U.S. always focuses on having the government pay some of the costs charged to consumers rather then reducing the costs of providing healthcare. E.g. more subsidies for this bloated industry, which only results in costs rising even more, and then calls for even more subsidies when people can't afford to pay the costs. When what we should do is fire 50% of the staff and cut the pay of those that remain by another 50%. That's the only way to get affordable healthcare.
And you have a similar problem with higher ed.
It’s you, to yourself. What we have is not by any stretch of the imagination a free market solution. It’s insane amounts of paper pushers created by the government. The whole insurance system we have is an impractical mess designed to fail. The free market would never have designed something so customer unfriendly, people would have gone elsewhere had competing solutions been allowed to exist. In a free market, you are free to go somewhere else.
Our health system is designed by the government, by way of outlawing everything else. If you want to talk free market, in the early 1900s it was common for large companies to keep a doctor on staff and offer their services to employees. That was essentially outlawed.
The rise of cash only flat rate doctors in current years is the closest thing we have to free market, and they’re great. Prices posted up front. No back and forth with insurance companies.
I'd be interested in how the free market develops that solution. At the very least, regulation would be involved. And we all know how adept the free market is at getting around regulation.
Anyway. I'm off to go lie to myself some more. Cheers.
> The whole insurance system we have is an impractical mess designed to fail.
You shifted the boogeyman from corporate suits to politicians in the space of a few comments. If nobody has malicious intent then nothing was "designed to fail". It just doesn't work as expected or wanted by anyone involved.