The problem with universal health care in the US is the same as gun control and climate change. It doesn’t matter how large a majority are in favor of changing things, this democracy runs on money, rather than votes.
If this country were to wrest control away from the 1%, we might find ways of addressing all sorts of intractable problems from lead in the water, to failing infrastructure, to fracking that ruins water tables. But those things simply aren’t that important to the persons/legal entities that run this country.
Given the rate of MRIs in the USA is way higher than Canada, I suspect that cases like my mother’s would have been considered medically necessary (which it was - otherwise my mother would not have gotten the MRI at all). However, it wasn’t considered time-critical.
Note, when my 3-year old son did need a critical MRI, the wait time was only 6 hours. Years later, a completely diagnostic MRI for a medical study had a 1 year wait time. That’s it for people I know who’ve had MRIs in their lifetime.
I’d be hesitant to use the work “guarantees”. I’m a for-profit entity, who has minimum costs of, say, $20K. I’m pretty certain I’d not be as efficient if my salary was adjusted to remove all my profit and absolutely nothing in my performance could change that. Of course, I may be uniquely greedy.
Of course, it’s also ludicrous to say that profit guarantees efficiency. But your claim is hugely stronger.
America’s profit-oriented medical system produces research and technologies that become “public goods” for the rest of the world. Most of the “best practices” that medical systems used throughout the world started in the US and are cheap knock-offs, etc.
If you consider the American populace as a whole to be part of the 1% (its median income > the $34K household income that makes you part of the global 1%), then perhaps its duty as a world leader is to produce medical technologies that will filter down to the rest of the world when they become cheaper.
Maybe it’s the other developed countries like my own (Canada) that are neglecting their moral responsibility by putting the good of their citizenry over the long-term health of the world…
Which seems silly, but then my son is alive because of medical practices that as far as I can tell originated in the USA. My mother is walking because of an operation developed (at incredible cost) in the USA.
(The actual operation for my mother was actually a cheaper variant of the original operation developed in the US. This variant was developed in Europe, costs about 1/10th (less invasive) and only has a few percent less success rate. In the USA, the operation isn’t done - adding a few percent to the odds of leaving someone paralyzed from the waist down for life isn’t worth the money saved. In a single player system, we simply remove the choice of the more expensive option.)
The utility of the profit-taking part of the system is grossly exaggerated. Those medical advances are in very large part produced by universities and then sold to for-profit companies. I used to be on a drug that was invented by a public university that sold the patent to a private company which went on to make billions off of it. The for profit system is why we aren’t working on new antibiotics - maintenance drugs pay more than cures.
There’s no “choice” to be made for the more expensive option unless you fall into a very, very narrow band of wealth where you’d actually weigh the cost. The vast majority of people can’t pay, a tiny minority think the cost is trivial.
The idea that the private sector produces an array of choices is misleading for things like healthcare.
Clinically usable penicillin, cochlear implants, ultrasound scans, IVF, spray-on skin. All Oz, and those are just the most prominent things off the top of my head; there’s a lot more than that. And Australia is a minor contributor compared to Europe, thanks to our much smaller population.
The US medical system leads the world in drug marketing. On research, the US does okay relative to its size and wealth, but it is nowhere near the sole contributor.
Most of the US science budget goes to the military.
They become commodities for the rest of the world. Yes, sometimes, they do become public goods that are either freely or cheaply available, but there are plenty of newer drugs still under patents, that are only affordable because an organization like the Gates Foundation, the US government, UN, WHO, Carter Center financially help out in some way.
This is false. Between high deductibles and copays, even middle-class, employer-insured Americans hesitate to get quality, timely preventative care because of the expense.
FFS, a 50 year old at risk of sudden cardiac death declines an implantable defibrillator because of the cost! We’re talking upper-middle class Americans with good jobs.The same person, 20 years later, wouldn’t hesitate, because Medicare.
Indeed. I can speak to medical device innovation, which definitely does not require the profit motive to thrive. The folks who innovate in the medical device space are typically engineer-inventors. Sure, they would like to get a payout, but it’s nothing like consumer software/internet startups. Between the VC’s cut and the very high barrier of FDA approval to going alone all the way to market entry, most successful medical technology startups exit prior to the first unit sold commercially. The founders still make some money, but it’s pretty modest in the grand scheme of things.
Established, large, mature medical device companies just don’t innovate. That’s what their M&A department is for, and their core product development could just as easily be done in a non-profit model.
