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Comment by downWidOutaFite | Hacker News Reader

Funny because I feel the opposite. Health care is so broken with all the politics, insurance, bureaucracy, financialization, etc that the vast majority of people are not able to reap the rewards of progress. Even the science is perverted because of bad incentives and only potentially lucrative research is funded.

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I was about to say we pay for all this super modern progress by making healthcare so expensive it's out of reach of the vast majority of people in the world (and in the US).

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-28...

Over 92% of Americans have health insurance. The vast majority DO have access to healthcare.

I wouldn't say having some type of insurance == access to healthcare.

The increase in deductibles and decrease in % coverage throughout the course of my career has been shocking.

Until the “wrong” ambulance comes to your door.

It couldn't exist otherwise. The privileged will always be the ones to push the boundaries of any endeavor, medicine included. Have hope that those rewards continue to work their way down, even though the process is long and arduous.

> It couldn't exist otherwise

That's just a failure of imagination, no? Endless sci-fi stories tell us a better world is possible, including wild genetic treatments curing deafness. Why should that apply to tech, but not society?

Name one story where privilege doesn't flow from the top down. That's not a story, that's a fever dream.

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