The market has solved it.
You just don’t realize what the market has solved for. It didn’t solve the problem of expensive healthcare, it solved the problem of how to maximize profits for the wealthy.
That’s what people don’t understand about “the market”. What you think it’s doing isn’t what it’s actually doing.
If the free market had any real competitors, the problem would genuinely solve itself in favor of the consumer. We see this with any new tech where a bunch of new firms try to win customers by any means necessary in those first few years.
The problem as always is: where are the competitors after X years, and are these “competitors” actually competing anymore?
The solution as always is: regulate. Ensure competition. Ensure cartels aren’t price fixing. But no one wants to hear that
The streaming market has tons of competition. So then why are prices endlessly rising and content being removed and the value being made worse with ads?
The video game market also has tons of companies in it, and yet most of them are making the experience worse with ads and service-based games.
I’m so old I used to install my games on 5 1/2" floppies. I dispise how the video game market changed from an ownership model to service-based and micro transactions models that are popular today. Don’t even get me started on mobile games. What I have noticed is that I am paying almost the same price for a video game today as I was 30 years ago. A game that I paid approximately $75 for in 1994 I should be paying approximately $150.00 for a new release today. Yet I’m still paying $75 for a game, they have to be making up that difference somewhere. Now the tools needed to make a game have had an enormous impact on reducing costs, and there’s a whole bunch of other economic stuff I’m ignoring. Regardless, it’s still kind of amazing the price of games hasn’t inflated.
I have an honors minor in medical humanities and took several medical policy courses. We looked at this exact graph from previous years as well as several other huge sets of data/graphs/studies and anything else related to insurance you can imagine. Insurance is not a standard market commodity and does not follow the same trend or logic. The only way you can lower premiums in insurance is by reducing the risk in the pool, or increasing the pool size to dilute the risk. This is either increasing the total pool size by increasing premiums, getting more people, or being selective about who joins the risk pool. The third one was what was called “preexisting conditions” and kept high cost people from entering the risk pool and draining the funds. This got banned and increased premiums. By increasing competition you end up splitting up the pools, making everyone’s premiums go up. This happened multiple times post ACA after the GOP started stripping out the funding and safeguards to prevent this. More and more competition opened up with artificially low premiums being subsidized by federal dollars, but then when the subsidies ended the premiums started jumping. Then when the premiums were jumping, new companies opened up to make more competition advertising lower rates, but then further fractured to pool sizes, leading to premiums skyrocketing. If you look back just 10 years ago there was a 3-5 year stretch of premiums increasing almost 30% year after year. It was due to all the competition opening up every year. This is why single payer systems have the lowest rates. If you have even one private company monopoly with a regulated cap on profits you would still end up with lower premiums. Then, if this single paying company was nationalized to take out the profit making middle man, the premiums are that much lower because your risk is spread across a massive pool. More competition in insurance makes the problem worse. I would agree with your stronger regulation though. There is a lot that can be done there.
I want to hear it. I want to hear it in my music. My daily discussions. My podcasts. On my television. In my social media. I cannot hear it enough. It’s gives a joyous and wonderful feeling.
By the time the system has consolidated enough that there is little effective competition, those companies have also become so large that they can lobby for regulatory capture. It’s not zero regulation, but rather a form of regulation that solidifies their position while still providing the same shitty service they always have.
Regulation won’t work. The system is too far gone.
What other tools are there for ensuring a fair market? Government intervention seems like the only avenue
have you tried not voting for thieves porn stars and real estate developers? Maybe get someone in who could possibly know what they’re talking about
I N N O V A T I O N Doctors in the US spend about 25% of their time dealing with insurance companies
Sure. But the graphic is very much cherry picked. There is plenty of space between the US and Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
What surprises me is the high rank of Australia!
- Infrastructure in Australia is unfavorable… like the US (thin emc network vs. helicopters in Germany that are super common, Germany is a dense country, everywhere hospitals… Australia a desert with some coast. Like US.)
- Australians are basically US americans of the south (think food: originally british, cannot be healthy, no good car manufacturers, afraid of foreigners…)
- Everything is trying to kill you in Australia!
What the heck are they doing?
But maybe the Germans can learn from the Australians something. Germany‘s System is such a inefficient mess… just the administrative effort to maintain dozens of public health care insurances… crazy!
Is this a good comparison? Feels like we’re missing all of the US administration, insurance is just a part of it.
Barely, but doctors here in Germany are always complaining about difficulties they have with insurances. Especially the dozens of different public insurances. System here is an unconsolidated mess. Apart from having optional private insurance.
Like my doctor working on treatment and not being buried with administrative tasks.
The best part is that it’s only State spendings, people in the USA also pay for private insurance individually!
Americans essentially pay for our insurance 4 times.
we pay more tax dollars per patient than ay other country
We pay hundreds per person per month in insurance premiums
We pay all healthcare expenses until we hit our annual deductible
We they pay a co-pay percentage after all treatment beyond the deductible.
Everyone knows it’s a broken system, but people are adamant that anything else would be communism or would make you lose an election.
Wait the life expectancy in the US is that low?!
I’m guessing the target goal is whatever they set retirement age to be.
(Yes, I realize they want to eliminate retirement entirely.)
That’s average. So if you have a lot of money and are spending it to raise the average cost, you probably live as long or longer than the other countries. On the other hand, the poors have a live expectancy that much lower to average it out. So call it 70 for the poors and 82 for the rich.
…how did the line come about? How did they determine what the life expectancy would have been with less expenditure per capita?
My guess is that this was a gif at some point and the line is historical data
Definitely, you can see some lines in the top left zigzagging back left, which would not be possible if each was a function of the x-axis. In fact, both axes are a function of the hidden z-axis, which is time and comes in discrete yearly steps, the latest of which (2021) is highlighted.
At least one of those lines goes back on itself at some point, so my assumption is that it’s tracking where each country has been over time.
Yeah something is weird about this graph.
Health expense in what timeframe? Monthly, yearly?
If i had to guess, i would say this graph just shows the average yearly health expense of people that died at age X
So people that spend more money on their health, live longer. If thats the whole message this is the most boring graph ever.
If the US line is true, it shows that people there get much less value out of the money they spend on their health.
There is a minimum amount which is likely the least some people spent on their health. So there is no interpolation I can see.
