Hacker News Reader

Comment by brainchild-adam | Hacker News Reader

I, for the life of me, cannot understand how something as essential as healthcare does not take priority over comparatively less essential things.

It must be an unintended result of our complex societal setup with each stakeholder pursuing their own limited gain with no regard for the bigger picture, because it just makes no sense.

Same is true for other essentials such as firefighting, basic infrastructure, etc.

Why would I rather have 5G/Fibre/stadiums/TV shows/[any other less essential contrasting example] than proper healthcare?

If I cannot pay for both, let's have the more important one.

I know I'm oversimplifying. I believe my core point still stands.

View on HN

Healthcare is expensive and have massive fines built in for good reasons. Government jobs are for life with little to no repercussions. Also they might not align people correctly with incentives. We need government run programs with private sector like efficiency.

> Government jobs are for life with little to no repercussions.

This is one of the main problems: without some kind of feedback mechanism, this means bureaucracy can only monotonically grow which means inefficiency can only increase. At some point that inefficiency starts making private healthcare look competitive.

That's pretty much it. Government jobs are lower paid because money comes from taxing private sector. Career growth there is all about how big of a team in numbers someone has reporting to them.

Italian health care costs 125B€ per year, defense costs about 26B, pensions about 300B. We already spend an insane amount of money, everything else is peanuts, including defense, which btw will have to be increased thanks to russian invasion.

The examples you listed are nearly free compared to the cost of social welfare programs, free/affordable education and infrastructure.

Eg it is not obvious to me that we should close schools (or let them go to shit) to pay for health care.

We’re paying a ton of money in America and have worse results.

The human race managed to survive pretty well for millennia without any sort of healthcare system. So how essential is it? Most of the major modern gains in life expectancy have been due to public sanitation and childhood vaccination. Everything else we get from healthcare is marginal.

Healthcare is certainly important, and we ought to provide affordable access to at least basic healthcare to everyone. But it's not essential in the same way as water, food, housing, and energy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com