There is absolutely a lack of resources when it comes to medical care. There aren't enough nurses, doctors, mental health professionals, specialized medical equipment, or in some instances even blood, to go around right now.
This "post scarcity" mentality isn't based on reality.
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is a scarcity of intelligent people willing to devote their entire lives to the study of medicine across specialties.
If you cannot afford it, the US healthcare is terrible. If you have the means to afford it, the US healthcare system is one of if not the best in the world.
This is untrue according to all metrics I have seen (such as life expectancy). Do you have any evidence to back this statement up?
10 of the leading 12 causes of death are diseases, with the first non-disease cause coming in at #4.
You can see the breakdown of life expectancy reducing factors here, none of which are attributable to "limited specialized treatment": https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low
https://www.gbhoh.com/fentanyl-becomes-leading-cause-of-deat...
I still fail to see cars and guns being the leading cause of death.
Do you see something I don't?
https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...
The point under debate is guns and car accidents being asserted as the leading cause of death. I continue to assert it is not true.
Many of our worse outcomes though have nothing to do with the healthcare system. The decrease in life expectancy is being driven by factors like obesity, substance abuse, sedentary lifestyles, vehicle crashes, suicide, and violence.
That's unfortunately not even the case. Americans spend more money on healthcare AND have worse outcomes.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27843...
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2022/07/how-does-the-us-healthcare...
None discuss outcomes among only those who "have the means to afford it" so none of them refute GP's claim.
This might be true in theory but is somewhat irrelevant here given the gargantuan levels of waste in US military spending.
There is also gargantuan waste in healthcare costs, but those are spread out via insurance, not taxes.
The presence of gargantuan waste in both sectors and the different avenues of spending both make any after-the-fact, simplified explanation of why one costs more than the other kind of moot.
The presence of gargantuan waste should also be addressed before implying that the costs of healthcare are all presumed necessary.
Why? Are money and social status insufficient motivators? Or is there another reason?
In the US, we ration by price… “the doctors expensive and I don’t feel too bad so I’m not going to go”. In Europe, they ration via lines… you’ll get your free healthcare eventually.
Either way there are problems, but seems like other countries might be onto something
It is an important distinction. For example, about 33% of healthcare dollars go to paying “claims proceesing” people at your insurance company and your doctors office to haggle with each other and produce duplicate paperwork.
If the low end of your estimate (5x) is the correct multiplier, the money that goes to claims processing would be enough to pay for universal healthcare in pretty much any other first world country.
Other things, like absurdly high drug prices, also are not healthcare spending. 90+% of drug discovery research money is spent at universities, and not by pharmaceutical companies. Also, those companies pay more for prescription drug advertising than for drug research.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about drug discovery research. The major expense in bringing a new drug to market is not in the basic research but in the phase-3 clinical trials. Those often cost pharmaceutical companies upwards of $1B now.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-40
By comparison, several major tech companies have significantly higher profit margins.
This is not true, but there is a big non patient healthcare services culprit in US healthcare costs, and that is legal liability. In the US, every entity in the healthcare chain is doing so much extra to prevent themselves from being liable, and charging extra in case they are found liable, that it inflates all costs dramatically.
Without tort reform, I doubt we see much improvement.
Afaik this is simply not true, and even if it was, this would be misleading if you consider that most costs are made during clinical trials, which test the effectiveness of the drug.
The US medical system has been systematically optimized for extracting the maximum possible amount of money from every patient, part of which is artificially restricting available supply of medical care (although things are slightly getting better in that regard with practicing nurses and PAs)
The other thing it was optimized for was hiding this from the patients.
And only now, in 2023 are we beginning to see the horrible extent of this, because of price transparency rules.
Then again, it should be matter of at least a majority agreement that things like that should be paid from taxes, and it's obvious that in the US the agreement is not there.
Are you seriously arguing against taxpayer-funded education? As broken as U.S. public education is, managed as it is by hyper-local, ideologically-motivated officials, withdrawing the opportunity to raise one’s lot in life through community-funded education would be pretty dystopian.
Or perhaps you were referring to post-secondary education only?
Many of these really aren't resources though. Lumber, iron, and oil are resources but shelter, medicine, and utilities are all products made with resources. Education isn't even either, it's a service.
Whether they are all necessities today is up to opinion, and I expect the are good arguments to be made that they are all necessary, but they definitely aren't resources.