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Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

How effective was medicine before WWII? How complex was it? How many instruments for extensive tests were there? Labs that would run analysis to find out what is wrong with you so that doctors could figure out how to best cure you?

Sure, the current system is preposterous and prices are way higher that necessary, but we can't just compare with the past unless you also want a service like the one you'd got in the past, which is probably still quite affordable.

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You don't need to compare with the past. Just compare with other countries, where you can pay 300 a month and have all your family fully covered privately. No copay. No public health. Although you can skip the payment and get public health. Or even have both and decide when to go private and when public. All in much less powerful economies.

Sure. The let's make that comparison and not construct an argument using pre WWII data as a reference, which was what I was replying to.

I think OP was pointing to a potential starting point of the raise in prices and decoupling it from the actual services rendered. Something I think is very likely given that now there are a lot of examples where things are comparable quality with much lower prices. It might not be exactly WWII, but it certainly was caused by some factors not tied directly to the quality of the services.

Right, I never tried to say that there was only one cause for prices going up. However, note that technology has vastly decreased costs across all industries too. Faster communications, faster billing and payments, digital images instead of film that has to be developed, etc, etc. It’s not immediately obvious that the rising quality of healthcare would necessarily make it more expensive, given the vast cost reductions happening at the same time.

Technology has vastly decreased the cost of things that existed.

Technology also vastly increased the cost of things that didn't exist.

Prior to the invention of video games, nobody spent a dime on video games. People today spend a lot of money in air travel while before WWII very few people spent money on air travel. Etc

Yes, but videogames cost roughly the same all around the world.

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