[TheAdamAndChe]

We can complain about capitalism all we want, but at the end of the day, in America, we still live in a capitalistic society. Good deeds that cannot happen profitably will not happen here en masse without subsidies, period.

Given that our government has proven incapable of subsidizing healthcare in a way that promotes a combination of efficiency and effectiveness, it makes total sense that people would try to make a profitable business that meets the needs of our citizens. That's just how capitalism works.

Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain? What flaw do I have in my logic?

[dang]

The problem is that you have a marked tendency to turn HN threads into generic ideological tangents, as you've done here, and this takes them in a direction of lower quality. If there's any generalization about HN threads that holds up, it's that one, so would you please take this in and stop doing this here?

This isn't an observation for or against capitalism. It's an observation about ideological arguments on the internet. The specific ideological flavor doesn't matter; it works the same dismal way regardless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[TheAdamAndChe]

I was responding to a comment that starts "It's amazing that someone can go through this and come to the conclusion, at the end, that the solution is that this is a business opportunity that would make a lot of money if someone could just make it more efficient." It's a pretty direct critique of the use of capitalism in the healthcare industry. How did I make it any more of a generic ideological argument than my parent comment?

edit: Upon review of my recent comments, I'll admit that their quality is poor. I'll try to avoid ideological squabble in the future. If you could still answer my question on this particular post, though, I'd appreciate it.

[dang]

These things are relative. You're right that the parent comment was turning toward an ideological tangent, but at least it was still moored to the original topic. Yours became unmoored and went fully generic. In both cases it would be better not to do this and to stay more substantive, but we only tend to post moderation comments in the second case, it being the more egregious.

I greatly appreciate your intention to avoid ideological squabble in the future. If only everyone would do the same our happiness would be complete! On that scale at least.

[ceejayoz]

> Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain? What flaw do I have in my logic?

The idea that we're in a "capitalistic society". Every country in the world lives somewhere on the spectrum between capitalism and socialism. The US is further towards the capitalistic side than Europe, but we've plenty of non-capitalist aspects of our society.

We already accept a wide array of socialist policies in the form of Medicare, Social Security, etc. We've also plenty of evidence from the rest of the developed world that the socialist approach to healthcare provides similar outcomes at greatly reduced cost. "We're capitalists, deal with it" is a fundamentally silly reason to avoid healthcare reforms.

[TheAdamAndChe]

I'm not saying that we shouldn't continue pushing for reform. I'm just saying that our government has proven incapable of reformation, and we should be pushing towards non-governmental approaches until they can get their act together. If we can improve the way things are through capitalism, that's still better than just yelling at politicians that don't do anything.

[toomuchtodo]

Can you explain your logic about pushing for non-government reform if "government has proven incapable of reformation"? There is no healthcare fix without government reform. If you provide healthcare, you must adhere to government regulation. You must accept Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates. If you provide insurance, you are at the whim of the government and what each new year brings [+].

> If we can improve the way things are through capitalism, that's still better than just yelling at politicians that don't do anything.

You cannot improve this with capitalism. You can only improve this by replacing politicians who are married to a broken system through vested interests.

[+] Healthcare startup Oscar is going through the grinder: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-15/obamacare...

[Joeri]

Any theories on why the US government is so much less capable than governments in other countries?

[megaman22]

Scale? If you look at governments that are comparable in size and number of citizens to the US, you don't see many that are all that effective.

Most of the comparisons that people like to bring up are European countries the size and population of US states.

[ceejayoz]

Scale is supposed to make things more efficient, not less. That's the whole idea behind "economies of scale".

Sure, if you want to pretend the EU doesn't exist, and that the US doesn't already manage Medicaid on a state-by-state level, there's a significant population difference... but Germany has nearly 100M people. We have strong evidence single-payer healthcare already works with large numbers of people.

[gech]

Gosh I wonder why politicians don't do anything in the interest of the public?

[davidw]

Didn't downvote you, but I do want to point out that health care providers earn a good living in places like Italy, where I lived for some time. My wife's family friend is a local doctor. He's got a nice house, a place in the mountains, a boat... he's doing well.

What's different is all the insurance BS we have in the US is missing.

Also worth reposting this: https://journal.dedasys.com/2017/02/22/entrepreneurship-and-...

[cmiles74]

I don't feel comfortable laying the abysmal and depressing tar pit of money and productivity that is the US healthcare system at the feet of "capitalism". In my opinion, the clumsy and inefficient interplay between health care providers, insurance companies, employers, the state and (lastly) individual people strikes me as one of the least capitalist-like situations we see today. It's almost a thought experiment: what would the US look like if people could afford to choose an affordable insurance company, peruse the various healthcare providers and choose among them and, lastly, be able to predict (with some amount of reliability) their healthcare costs over time?

Personally, I can't imagine it. All I know is that it wouldn't look like what we have now. Likewise, this argument that any criticism of the US healthcare system is somehow a criticism of capitalism strikes me as particularly unhelpful.

[ForHackernews]

> Given that our government has proven incapable of subsidizing healthcare in a way that promotes a combination of efficiency and effectiveness

Massive unsupported assertion. Medicare is very efficient.

[maxerickson]

Whether Medicare covers the cost of services provided is at least controversial.

If it doesn't, then it just gets the benefit of being mandated to look efficient.

[ams6110]

Medicare doesn't cover "everything" though -- nor could it. No health "insurance" whether it is single-payer, private, public, can just open the checkbook for every patient.

[TheAdamAndChe]

Yes, but that doesn't mean that the American healthcare system is efficient overall.