[pbz]

> I'd rather pay a little more to a corporation

It's hardly "a little more" though. We're spending almost twice as much and get almost half as little back. Objectively speaking the capitalist market has failed in this area. We have to first accept this fact before we can find any solutions. If we keep thinking "government is bad" and "private industry is good" we're only allowing further exploitation and pain; and for what? We need to be data/solution driven.

[_heimdall]

Ford twice as much I assume you're referencing healthcare specifically. Or healthcare system is horribly broken and in a terrible middle ground of government overreach and corruption while still technically being a private system. That's just about the worst example we could look at at which point twice as much doesn't sound nearly as bad for a worst case.

[robocat]

> Objectively speaking the capitalist market has failed in this area

Objectively speaking the non-capitalist systems have failed in this area too. The UK’s NHS is not capitalist and it is surely isn’t succeeding better than the US healthcare system.

You can find countries where “socialist” healthcare works, but you can also find capitalist healthcare that works.

[Matl]

> Objectively speaking the non-capitalist systems have failed in this area too. The UK’s NHS is not capitalist and it is surely isn’t succeeding better than the US healthcare system.

The NHS has been effectively privatized as much as the Conservatives could get away with. It is constantly underfunded. It is not an example of a system the government wants to make work. In fact making it not work is the goal.

Yet when a family member of mine needed a life saving operation, they got it promptly and it didn't send them into any debt, whereas in contrast there's something like 50k preventable deaths a year in the U.S. due to lack of healthcare and people of poor means actively avoid visiting the hospital, so the NHS still works better for the vast majority.

Yes, for us in the tech industry and for elective procedures it's not so great, but that also perhaps isn't what regular people need.

[robocat]

> 50k preventable deaths

I love that term. If you prevent death one day, only for them to die the next, is that one preventable death? What if you do that five days in a row? Death is not preventable.

Extra years of quality life, I can get on board with. Especially because it sounds more manipulable, so you are more wary about it’s meaning.

To put 50k/annum in perspective, 3.5 million people died in the USA in 2021.

It’s a difficult area to come up with numbers for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34045778

> people of poor means

Don’t poor people get some free healthcare in the US - although relatively how good that care is compared with other countries I don’t know. I thought it was the middle class that lose everything.

[abfan1127]

the banking industry has been heavily subsidized by FDIC, the Fed, and bailouts. This corporate socialization is certainly worse than either fully capitalist or fully centralized.

[largepeepee]

That is modern capitalism at its finest.

Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.

[_heimdall]

That's really not capitalism at all.

[largepeepee]

That is how capitalism works in reality.

[SoftTalker]

The healthcare marketplace is hardly capitalist. It's deeply influenced by government policy and spending, as most healthcare expenditure is for the old, and it goes through Medicare.

[LordDragonfang]

If the US healthcare market isn't capitalist, then no country's healthcare system is.

It's rare to find a way to "no true Scotsman" as hard as communists, but you've managed it.

But to address your point: contrary to what you're implying, Medicare spending is actually lower on average relative to spending on 65+'s in other countries; in e.g. the NHS, they're 18% of the population and 40% of the spending[1]. i.e. per-person spending is much higher in retirees. Contrast this with the US where per-medicare-enrollee spending (13k) is almost the same as the average spending (12.5k), because the non-socialized (capitalist) part of the market pays so much more than in other developed countries, that it doesn't bring down the average despite the younger cohorts having many fewer health problems.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/01/ageing-brita...

[astrange]

> If the US healthcare market isn't capitalist, then no country's healthcare system is.

Yes.

That said, developing countries are most likely to have one. If the government caps the number of doctors and hospitals in the country, like the US does with residencies and certificate of need laws, it's not very market-driven.

[pbz]

The government does not cap the number of doctors. There's no law that you can only have X doctors. What it caps is the amount of social help it's willing to subsidize. This is like complaining that the government is not "socialist" enough and therefore socialism is bad.

[astrange]

No, the US government caps the number of doctors because Medicare funds residency slots, and you have to get through one of those to get a license to be a doctor.

> There's no law that you can only have X doctors.

We have tons of these laws. All occupational licensing requirements are this law; that's the whole point of them.

[pbz]

The US government caps the number of residencies it is paying/subsidizing. Yes, you have to go through residency, but there's nothing stopping the private sector from taking on this cost (well, other than greed)

It is a subsidy program:

https://hospitalmedicaldirector.com/how-residents-are-paid/

> We have tons of these laws.

Point me to one law that says you are not allowed to have more than X doctors.