| So my four pigs analogy, where insurance companies, drug/device companies, doctors/hospitals, and lawyers all feed at the trough, increase costs and point to someone else (although I will admit lawyers are probably the smallest cost component and the most blamed by the other three). There is a fifth one that imposes costs: our comprehensively unhealthy food, health, and lifestyle in America that capitalism feeds upon with addictive high-margin food and drink, with overworked workers that can barely have time to raise kids (our healthy demographics are due to immigration) much less a healthy lifestyle. The entertainment complex certainly doesn't help either. Providers: you need comprehensive family care to avoid specialist care being needed, an increase in supply of doctors, decreasing their educational loan burden (which strongly incentivizes specializataion, and a system that involves specialists). I think advanced AI systems can do much more day-to-day tracking and diagnosis/information, but of course that is a personal information nightmare. Actually I don't mean advanced. I think current AI is plenty good enough. Unfortunately only insurance companies will employ these systems or pay for them. Insurance: Probably need a medicare-for-all option. We were close to this with Obamacare but FUCKING JOE LIEBERMAN killed it. Exhibit A in why the Democrats with full control of government will never get anything done. Drug/Device companies: reduce patents, I don't know, maybe allow price negotiation (which is just mind blowing in a "free market" economy), reform the FDA to make bringing drugs to market cheaper. Lawyers: caps caps caps so there isn't costly malpractice insurance. Maybe would also necessitate a federal review board to weed out "bad doctors". But the biggest is probably governmental direction to actually get people to be able to eat and live active lives. Maybe GLP-1 will help, but the quiet time bomb of increasing obesity in Americans each decade is probably a sneaky large amount of our costs. Otherwise, on the nihilistic side, keep doing whatever our society is doing which is causing men to kill themselves in huge rates (soma ... uh... I mean opioids were also doing this as well) before they reach their ultra-expensive late stage of life. Anyway, none of that is happening (except, sadly, the nihilistic solution is the most realistically happening). Maybe setup huge provider networks across the border in Mexico and Canada served by high speed transit, so large portions of the world get health maintenance in functioning health care systems, and only do hospitalization and emergency care here? |
We recently tried this with some vaccines and now a large segment of the population is now vaccine-hesitant.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10257562/
> Lawyers: caps caps caps so there isn’t costly malpractice insurance.
Caps don’t always result in improved health outcomes.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?p...
> Maybe would also necessitate a federal review board to weed out "bad doctors".
This exists; each state medical board has a procedure for reviewing medical licenses.
https://www.mbc.ca.gov/