Get an MD and help out, then you'll discover how you really DONT want the government to tell you which patients to serve.
Most people would consider money a resource, and quite a few rural hospitals are closing because of a lack of that specific resource.
> you'll discover how you really DONT want the government to tell you which patients to serve
Yeah, wait until you hear about private for-profit insurers doing that instead.
Slavery was estimated at ~12% and "hey, you need to lose a few % of your margin and actually pay those people" started a war.
Now, there's an argument to be made about ideology, geographic concentration of industry, etc. doing a fair bit of lifting kicking that off (their own neighbors telling them to stop surely would have gone over better than a bunch of smarmy northerners in their ivory towers telling them the same thing). But the fact remains that you cannot make a large fraction of the country take a haircut without causing strife.
The only way to fix this "nicely" at this point is to boil the frog over decades.
State politicians are much cheaper, and no one from the New York Times pokes around when you buy off the state representative of East Bumfuck, Montana.
Problem is you’ll go right to the emergency room when you have a heart attack.
Yes, the patient needs skin in the game. People need to take care of their own health. Most procedures are given to grossly unhealthy people.
Yes, completely privatize it. Make people pay for their care so their daily decisions are weighed against what affect it will have on their overall health.
Well, yeah. That's the idea behind "medically necessary". We don't do elective heart transplants on healthy people for funsies.
The hint here is that the random pricing needs to stop. Same procedure for the same price. No market can work if participants don’t know the actual price. Insurance and hospitals probably have a very good idea but patients are being kept totally in the dark. You are expected to just accept what this opaque machinery comes up with.
They just get to die, or what?
The reason healthcare in the US is expensive is very simple: too many cooks in the kitchen. Private insurance simply should not exist. The undeniable reality is that the only way to achieve maximum efficiency is top-down administration.
I understand that that makes libertarians uncomfortable. But what we all have to acknowledge is what we have is not working. Other countries have worked it out. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel here.