[hibikir]

Not for profits are equally unaligned: It's just a matter that instead of giving money to shareholders, it's all about the whims of whoever controls the non-profit company. Those whims can be good, or they can be quite bad.

American insurance company profits are higher than I'd like, but ultimately the magic of America's healthcare is its inefficiency. When you end up owing $3000 for a very minor ER visit, the money didn't just go to the insurance company's profits: A lot of people made more money out of it than in an equivalent visit in, say, a hospital in Spain. And it's not as if the inefficiencies are just due to a single part of the healthcare system being worse all by itself.

The difficult part is that one person's inefficiency is someone else's lunch, or yearly safari to Kenya, so every move to cut costs is politically untenable. Non profits don't fix this, any more than non-profit colleges make US higher education cheap.

[JohnFen]

> The difficult part is that one person's inefficiency is someone else's lunch, or yearly safari to Kenya, so every move to cut costs is politically untenable.

I think calling it "inefficiency" whitewashes the real problem. That "inefficiency" leads to a much higher rate of unnecessary deaths and adverse health outcomes in the US than nearly every other advanced nation.

And often, even if you can get good health care, the financial consequences are devastating. Even if you have insurance.