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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

It is not as easy as that because supply is heavily constrained. You need a lot more people able and willing to become doctors, nurses, people who change bedpans and clean hospital rooms, so on and so forth. Add in aging populations with fewer proportionate working age people, and the equation does not balance.

That is not something any policy change can fix until far in the future. In the short term, all that is possible is deciding who gets allocated the available healthcare.

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> The solution is to have universal catastrophic insurance for all citizens automatically

> It is not as easy as that because supply is heavily constrained

I don't think this argument works when the data shows 90%+ of the population has health insurance.

My assumption is that the many people, if not the majority, still avoid seeking healthcare due to a doctor visit costing a minimum of $250+. You can give everyone the $100k deductible insurance, which is great, but the issue in this thread is that a regular consultation with a doctor costs so much, that a $29 telehealth option (probably with someone less qualified than a doctor) is better.

Nurse practitioners have been allowed by states to handle more and more services. Telehealth primary care has enabled more scaling - I know because I use such a service for my whole family. I’m much, much more confident in the US to handle an influx of immigrants and aging retirees than Canada or the UK with their rigid services.

Yes, one of the ways that the limited resource of doctor time will be allocated is to simply have increasing portions of the population see people less qualified than doctors (perhaps not bad from a systems point of view if it is diagnosing conjunctivitis, but from an individual point of view, you can see where this is going.). You pay more, you get people who have met a higher standard of education/experience, e.g. concierge care and direct primary care practices.

Yes the reality is harsh. But much better than waiting 12 months to get in cancer care and then dying while you wait.

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