| > Keeping anybody alive is worth it. This might be true on average. But if you need to spend $1 million keeping a death row inmate alive who tried to commit suicide, that money might be better spent on infants with heart defects. Money being finite (and being an abstraction of medical equipment/expertise/hours which are also finite), you ultimately have scenarios where you have to choose one or the other. > This shows how destructive capitalism is: In its pursuit of maximizing the profits If something costs more than you can afford, then it is unaffordable. This remains true even for those who despise capitalism. The great innovation of communism was the destruction of all the data that would allow one to have insight about whether or not something was unaffordable or not. In the United States, insurance companies are heavily regulated, and premiums must reflect how much it costs to pay out claims, plus some small percentage for overhead. Nor do the hospitals themselves strictly seek profit... their adversarial relationship with insurance companies compels them to overbill in the theory that if one claim fails, the next can succeed... so price it for both. Profit-minimization isn't a very good strategy for long-term anything. If you want to be able to stay in business until next year so you can perform surgeries, you might have to, I dunno, at least break even. |
These are fallacies of the capitalist ideology - it creates scarcities and then imposes these as truisms. There is more 'money' in the capitalist west than what's needed to treat every single person living there. Its just being hoarded.
> In the United States, insurance companies are heavily regulated, and premiums must reflect how much it costs to pay out claims, plus some small percentage for overhead. Nor do the hospitals themselves strictly seek profit... their adversarial relationship with insurance companies compels them to overbill in the theory that if one claim fails, the next can succeed... so price it for both.
You are talking literal nonsense. The most expensive healthcare with the worst results on the planet is in the US. Statistically. Every argument you made above is null and void.