The Reason U.S. Healthcare is so Expensive [video]

If by "exceptional" you mean "incompetent", we are in agreement.

"American exceptionalism" is never used to mean "incompetence" or "less than..". It is always used to mean that we are better than others. We are not. In many ways we are far worse. In some ways we are far worse.

The mistake you might be making is not taking a moment to actually have a conversation and ask for clarification on my perspective. We all make that mistake in online conversations. I am not immune to that at all. Nobody is.

Don't confuse me saying that the US is not ready to institute what is generally referred to as "socialized medicine" we me suggesting that what we have been doing is the solution. Here's as clear a position statement as I can make on this:

It is disgusting, unforgivable and incomprehensible to me how a nation with the resources of the US does not have a healthcare system that covers everyone in the nation without people having to risk financial ruin to have access to healthcare. Our system should be the model by which everyone in the world measures their approach to healthcare and not an example of what not to do.

In other words, I firmly believe that healthcare in the US should not be something anyone looses sleep over, rich or poor. It should be, to use the term, exceptionally good. An example for all to follow.

The problem is that we are never going to get there when healthcare is so deeply connected to polarized politics, the incompetence and political party whims we have been subjected to for decades.

Our politicians have not worked for the people of this nation for decades (pick a number). In CS terms, their fitness function does not include a variable that measures the delivery of positive long term results for the people of this nation. Sometimes it seems that the only variables that drives their evolutionary path have been winning elections, accumulating power and polarizing the population along political party dividing lines in order to do so. In this sense, our system of government has been degrading for decades into something that, at the end of the day, does very little for us. In fact, one could argue the net effect is to constantly cause damage to this nation from the inside. We can list wars, healthcare, education, national debt, the economy and other areas as examples of this effect.

In this context, a system that would have this government in charge of our entire healthcare system would quickly become a nightmare. I shudder to think what that might look like. It would be horrible.

We cannot compare this nation to other nations. We cannot compare any two nations. Things that work elsewhere do not work here. There are cultural, legal and governmental differences everywhere.

Here's a simple example of that:

Sadly, in the US, when we have a disaster of some kind, people turn into mobs that destroy property and steal everything they can. They will break into homes and burn down business districts. It's sad to watch. And it is very real.

In Japan (and other nations), that simply does not happen. At all.

This has nothing to do with Japan's approach to policing or government. It's cultural. If we imported Japan's policing and government approaches into the US it would do nothing at all to mitigate this problem.

In the past, I lived in Latin America for over a decade. Both under democratically-elected (yeah, well, let's call it that) and military regimes. Guess what, they had "socialized medicine" that entire time. And it was a joke.

You cannot compare nations that way. You just can't.

From my perspective, I think what we have to do in the US is to release areas such as education and healthcare from the grips of political parties. In other words, there has to be unified national-level governance of these areas devoid of party affiliation. Policies should not change because a different political party is in power. That's breaking us. In a sense, it could be something like the Federal Reserve, which is politically neutral (nothing is 100%, but I think we can say they do far better than other agencies).

Anyhow, the point is, while I don't call it "socialized medicine", I do agree we need something that, conceptually at least, is similar to that idea. The US version of this solution likely looks very different from solutions in other parts of the world. How we get there is the problem.

No, Obamacare isn't that solution. It is, objectively speaking, an abomination. Today, you have 65 million people who think they have health insurance, when, in reality, they effectively signed their estates, their property, everything of value they own, to the government. That is horrible. That is criminal. Obamacare is, perhaps, the largest crime ever perpetrated against the people of this nation. If we were objective, nobody would support this abomination.

What do you think would happen here if we ran ads ever day for six months on every media outlet informing people of the fact that having Medicaid means the government gets to grab their property to pay for medical bills accrued starting when they become 55 years old?

Here's the part that collides with the concept of equity: For the poor or middle class, anyone who might barely manage to buy a home and live a modest life, Obamacare means that the government can take their entire estate. In this country, accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills after age 55 is incredibly easy. Which means that Obamacare could result in the middle class and below having to hand over their estates to pay for medical bills because their properties will barely cover the costs of the care they received. How is that not criminal?

>> Was my family being scammed when we were paying $600 per month for excellent insurance? > Thinking that $600 a month for health care is OK is your mistake.

What? That is what we were paying. If it cost more, we would have paid more. Not sure how you magically reach this conclusion at all. Explain?

And then Obamacare tripled it?

Even worse, our healthcare costs, adjusted for income, was roughly at the same ratio for DECADES before Obamacare. When our cost was tripled, our income did not double or triple.

Also, our $600 per month also meant that others were paying a lot less. Smaller families or individuals.

> The average American was already paying through the nose back in 2010, compared to other developed nations.

First of all, stop comparing nations. It's nonsensical. Even worse if we are talking about averages.

    You cannot apply the average to the population.

What matters is the probability distribution. The average is so flawed that nobody who understands statistics would dare use it for serious comparisons or decision making. Politicians and those who don't understand elementary statistics love it though.

Probability distribution is a far better metric, even if the distribution is divided into a (sufficient) number of bands.

Here's real data from 2022:

https://i.imgur.com/18ea7xB.png

This chart represents ten insurance premium bands and shows the probability distribution. The average (which is an average of averages) is somewhere around $22K per year. This is meaningless. It is easy to see that approximately 75% of insured pays over $20K per year. In a prior comment you called my situation an "anecdote". Sorry, 75% isn't even close to an anecdote.

It also shows that somewhere around 50% pay between $14K and the average of $22K. And only 6% pay less than $14K (and we don't know what that distribution looks like).

With approximately 300 million people covered by various forms of insurance, the above means:

  225 million pay over $20K per year
  150 million pay between $14K and $22K per year
  18 million pay less than $14K (no info on distribution)

I have to go back to Obama's promises. He said --on video, multiple times-- that the average family (yeah, I know) would save $2,500 a year. He lied.

This problem isn't a simple one. It is made far more complex by government players who are too busy fighting each other rather than doing good things for the nation. We have been promised better healthcare and education for decades. What we have to day is worse on almost all fronts. This needs to change.