Healthcare is not expensive for lack of huge government-entangled corporations monopolizing and commercializing patient personal information. At least not in USA, where healthcare legislation is written by and for the industry (e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/05/obamac...), and total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries with more universal healthcare systems, for worse outcomes in many objective measures (at least of overall social health, I realize the standard of care in America is probably second to none if you can pay for it).
I'm not sure. I've heard people handwave about this before, but if health industry corporations and their congressmen and senators are going to argue that, it should be explained and funded and voted on explicitly, rather than the alleged massive indirect subsidies via overpriced medicare and medicaid government expenditure if they're going to claim that's somehow the way health corporations fund their cutting edge R&D and high end treatments and clinics.
> There are still plenty of expensive threatments like cancer were the diagnosis is also costly just due to the tech used.
> A proper MRI is expensive, the analysis is slow and need experts etc.
I'm sure that's very true. A company that's struggles to keep a rudimentary chat app running for any length of time, spectacularly miscalculated its fiber project, to name a few obvious ones, does not instill any confidence that they would be the one to improve this. The medical industry is far more conservative and far more complicated than what Google has proven it is able to deal with IMO. You can't just move fast and break things, you can make shit up as you go along, you can't invent your own standards.
> There are plenty of things to optimize.
They've also not performed impressively on any kind of "AI" related thing, if that's what they're thinking. Their self-driving cars are still a curiosity and a long way off being revenue positive, if there is even a path to it, for example. Industry and legislative inertia and baggage aside, I don't even think a big old cumbersome dinosaur like Google has the chops to come in and make a big change. Put it this way if some revolutionary new startup company had a really great idea in healthcare, you would be disappointed if Google bought them.
> total healthcare expenditure is somewhere around double that of most other first world countries with more universal healthcare systems, for worse outcomes in many objective measures
I've seen this many times but it makes a meaningless healthcare = health correlation .
America has lots of systemic problems that affect health outcomes that are outside of healthcare. Low quality fast food, food addiction, industrialized farming, corn subsides, food deserts, deceptive food marketing to name a few.
> I've seen this many times but it makes a meaningless healthcare = health correlation .
It doesn't, it's just making an observation.
> America has lots of systemic problems that affect health outcomes that are outside of healthcare. Low quality fast food, food addiction, industrialized farming, corn subsides, food deserts, deceptive food marketing to name a few.
Sure, America has many issues and many more than you've listed. So do other countries. And they all have many differences in healthcare systems. All this makes it impossible to formulate a mathematical proof. Which fortunately I was not trying to do.
So we can't really measure the precise effectiveness of healthcare systems and health expenditure, sure. But surely the burden is on the people who would to claim that 2x healthcare expenditure for worse (or not significantly better) health than many other countries is a reasonable cost efficiency, to come up with some pretty strong evidence to support them.
> 2x healthcare expenditure for worse (or not significantly better) health than many other countries is a reasonable cost efficiency, to come up with some pretty strong evidence to support them.
yes we have healthcare system that treats disease, after that fact. Americans are a sickly group of people. Lionshare of expenditure goes to treating chronic metabolic illness. These people cannot be returned back health once they have metabolic syndromes. So matter how much money you spend on healthcare there is no real way to convert sickly ppl back into healthy people. No doctor has a way to fix diabetes or thyroid dysfunction.
Again, goes back to my original comment. "healthcare" has nothing to with "health".