The bizarre thing is that the problems are fixable. The federal government already spends more per capita on healthcare than other developed countries, just that our healthcare is so much more expensive and for no good reason.
Of course there's also a certain amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that inflate our costs.
And there are no long queues for healthcare where I live. Service is cheap and insurance is nationalized.
It literally does. The costs of producing drugs are mostly borne by the US market, allowing drug manufacturers to charge less elsewhere while still investing the billions of dollars necessary to develop the drugs.
- Why doesn’t this happen in other fields? Why don’t we pay 10x more for iPhones?
- When did the american public chose to engage in this magnanimous largesse?
More likely it’s a scam and regulatory capture
I think it's a mix of pharma lobbying and also altruism. Pharma lobbies Congress to do the altruistic thing, and many Congresspeople agree, because they believe in markets and understand incentives.
For example the prohibition on importing drugs from other countries, or the rules that prevent medicare from negotiating price for drugs
There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And greed is good, right?
> the problems are fixable
Fixable in theory. The US would first have to fix the underlying issue, which i.m.o. is government, media and even judicial capture by financial interests. Billionaires are now openly buying "shares" in those. I don't see any sign of it changing anytime soon. It only seems to get worse.
I think pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and legal companies take all the money.
Then these folks can contribute to the economy constructively, somewhere else instead of being a giant helksink of cost. A win-win for everyone
I tried to find a health care CEO to comment, but they're all busy hiding from assassins.