Hacker News Reader

Comment by nh23423fefe | Hacker News Reader

> Blame insurers, drug companies — and your employer

> That's because employers will be paying a lot more

> Drug companies, pharmacy benefit managers, hospitals and others have collectively driven up the costs of accessing medical care

> more people are going to the doctor or other providers. But that surge in demand has also led to a surge in prices.

> Last year, the average U.S. employer spent more than $19,000 per employee to provide family coverage while the employee kicked in $6,000,

Why should health care ever get cheaper? Americans treat our bodies like garbage bins for sugar and fat. Old people spend 100ks just to die in a hospital 3 months later. The narrative is always that some rich dude did it to you though?

View on HN

Both can be true though, most people don't care about their health until it's too late, but the health care system isn't sane either.

Perhaps a solution is to reward people to a greater extent for those who improve their health. Quit smoking, premiums come down. Lose weight, premiums come down. The insurance companies should be working with the doctors and the patients to identify ways they can improve their health to bring down the premium. A healthier person I would assume is a less pecuniary risk to the health insurance company

But they don't seem to do that.

> Americans treat our bodies like garbage bins for sugar and fat.

Even this isn't so simple. Foods in America are engineered explicitly to increase consumption, often (but not exclusively) by increasing fat, sugar, and salt. A good example of this is bread, as most breads sold in the US would be classified as cake in other countries due to the added sugar.

The only way to avoid this is to make your own food by scratch, which simply isn't viable for a large population living paycheck to paycheck.

After the rise in popularity of Ozempic, packaged food companies started trying to figure out how to engineer food that would overcome even Ozempic's craving suppressions. It's truly ruthless what they are doing to us. https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/medical-experts-warn-big-...

Obesity and diet aren’t the primary drivers of expense in the American health care system. The market structure is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com