| US health care is fundamentally broken. Things like "standardizing the interface" are really just arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The US spends the most on health care for fairly terrible outcomes. Health insurance companies are rent-seekers. They provide absolutely no value. They are simply designed to siphon money to shareholders at the expense of people dyijng due to denied or insufficient coverage. They are literally merchants of death. Did you know that lobbyists managed to sneak in a provision to the ACA (aka "Obamacare") that prohibited physician-owned hospitals? That's still in effect. That's what we get with this ridiculous system. Even non-profit hospitals engage in similar behaviour to for-profit institutions because their executive are overpaid [1] and are incentivized not to spend money on healthcare and instead engage in fundraising and increasing funds under administration, a little like how elite colleges do. Also unlike every other developed country the US government is prohibited by law from negotiating drug prices with one exception: in the Obama era the VA was allowed to negotiate prices and thus pays a lot less than, say, Medicare. It's even more ironic that most novel drugs are the result of Federal research dollars. The only research most pharamaceutical companies engage in is patent extension. Last year, the IRA was passed that will allow in a few years the government to negotiate prices on a handful (8?) medicines and even that faces stiff opposition in Congress. This system needs to be scrapped. [1]: https://revcycleintelligence.com/news/how-nonprofit-hospital... |