| > Health insurance in America is broadly profitable Health insurance is actually a lot less profitable than most big businesses. Something like half as profitable as the S&P 500 average. But ignoring that, there are also big non-profit insurers. They aren't appreciably different. There's a big misconception that if we could just remove profit from our healthcare system every problem would be solved. However, if you look at where healthcare dollars go, profit and administrative overhead (insurance, hospital admin, etc.) are a single digit percentage of overall spending. If you could wave your magic wand and make it go away tomorrow, things would barely change. Note that even countries with socialized medicine have administrative overhead in the single digit percentage range, so it's not actually possible to drive it to zero. We severely overestimate how much of our healthcare dollars go to profits and executive compensation. I think because those are the only safe targets to be mad at. Nobody wants to engage in conversations about getting surgeons to take lower compensation or limiting certain types of care (which is very much a thing in any medicine system). American healthcare is expensive, but we Americans also consume (and demand) much more healthcare than elsewhere in the world. |
Unless it’s addictive or subject to group effects (e.g. antibiotics), it should be OTC. If someone kills themselves self administering another YouTube cure, that’s on the influencer and the patient.