Here is a wild idea: Perhaps the core of the problem just simply IS for-profit health care itself. Perhaps if someone has cancer, nobody should profit?
Does that mean the doctors and nurses and others should all work for free to? If individual people can 'profit' by providing care, i.e. a doctor, why can't a collection of people providing the same service, but as a company be allowed to profit as well?
The healthcare system in Europe doesn't gauge its sick citizens the way the U.S. healthcare system does, and yet, last I checked, doctors in Europe, while certainly earning less than in the U.S., do not "work for free" or are unable to provide for themselves and their families.
But what I really meant "inordinately profit from" so I should have specified that
So your idea is, rather than address known issues in the system, replace the system with one that is known not to work?
This seems to be a common paradoxical argument made whenever drug prices get brought up, particularly insulin. I’ve seen people make the argument numerous times about how outrageous it was that Eli Lilly, which was sold the patent for insulin in the early 20th century for a dollar, is charging hundreds of dollars for insulin today. And yet when it is pointed out that they sell insulin for $20 at Walmart, and the insulin that costs hundreds are newer synthetic versions, the response is that people can’t be expected to use the old stuff because the new stuff is much safer, effective, and easy to use.
Which is it? If the new medicine is ineffective, then why do you need to buy it over the older, cheap options? If it is truly an improvement, then why is it wrong for the producers to charge more to account for the R&D costs required to create the new medicine?
Where do you draw the line?