People can’t afford candy bars, so lets give them MORE MEMBERSHIP CARDS!
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I have anonymized and banned the new user who was reading from a US Health Care industry playbook as many of you answered that account. Please continue the conversation without that poster.
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You know if you sneak across the border to Canada, you can get a generic candy bar for $90.
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Hmm. I like the clause “in some ways”. That makes your statement undeniably true.
Here is a pretty good comparison of the role of government in various countries’ health care systems: How does universal health coverage work?
BTW, welcome to BoingBoing.
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“Sir, that’s a pre-existing condition. I don’t have to serve you.”
I hope this isn’t the tweet in 2020.
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Now remind me again which Democrat candidates are for MediCare for all?
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Every since WebMD came on line!
Unfortunately, it turns out every sign/symptom I’ve ever had is cancer. It’s always cancer.
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I think the biggest one is the “both buyer and seller are there voluntarily”
You can decide to simply not buy a new TV. That same decision often cannot be made with health care. When the salesman knows you need to buy, they’ll charge whatever you can pay.
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It’s a fascinating field, the US health industry. The fact that a for-profit third party handles the money makes it extra intriguing.
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I’m pretty sure the GP was talking about one of those theoretical “perfect markets” that mathematicians like because they don’t have all of those messy real-world considerations.
Every real world market is imperfect to some degree. The question is how much. The US healthcare system is staggeringly inefficient thanks to a lack of available information in a grossly over-complicated system.
This is good for people making a profit. Profits are basically impossible to come by in a perfect market. The more imperfect a market is the more opportunity there is for people to make money. The US healthcare system may not be so good at keeping people healthy, but it does provide a lot of value to shareholders.
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Here in the UK, the National Health Service harnesses the power of the market to obtain drugs at lower prices.
I am of course referring to the pharmaceutical market, where the NHS is the largest buyer in the country.
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The why is: the people with the strongest lobby are made incredibly rich by having a captivw marketplace that doesn’t display prices.
They lije being rich. They don’t like losing money. Therefore it will continue until only rich people can have healthcare.
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Well, according to Wikipedia:
Millennials , also known as Generation Y (or Gen Y ), are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years.
So:
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And this right here is why the fucks on the swivelled-eyed wing of the Tory part are doing the damnedest to get us out of the EU. They want to flog the NHS to Trump and his merry band of kleptos.
#IndyRef2
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There are certainly other examples of information asymmetry. I go to my mechanic and he tells me I need a new voltage regulator or something like that. Do I need that, really? I know less about that than the mechanic.
But the healthcare system is worse than average in that regard. In buying insurance or in choosing a provider, you are not in any position to judge what is a better deal: each insurer has a complex pricing structure that is opaque to you until you need some care, and there’s lot of care you might need that you can’t research in advance. But once you need it, you have to wave that card you have and hope that you are not horribly screwed.
What also makes the U.S. healthcare system pernicious is partial monopolies: there are usually only a few health insurers in a particular market, and a few hospitals in a locality. So you are kind of stuck with what is on offer, and it’s not a lot of choice. In some localities, practically no choice.
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For most of my life, health care has been a luxury that was never even close to within my reach.
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I think “Millennial Dad” missed the point entirely. It should be “I need some candybar please” and the answer is "It’s cheaper for society to band together to give you this candybar then to produce an invoice which you can’t pay, forcing you to need more candybars, come back here again and get a bill for 10 times as many candybars, which you also can’t pay for, but ultimately society will need to pay for ".
Healthcare is a service which benefits the public good, not a consumable with random pricing arrangements.
I get the point, but we need to use a better analogy to defend it.
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He’s describing the system how it is, not how it ought to be.
The US medical system is fucked up.
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