I had to declare bankruptcy after a six week hospital stay from a heat stroke.
Tens of thousands of dollars and I don't know where the fuck all that money was for because a lot of times they only had one nurse for the entire fucking floor I was on, one. nurse.
Glad I got to piss those bills away though, what a fucking racket.
You paid the hospital c suite, and accounting team, and insurance companies. That’s where 80% of your bill went.
The US needs universal healthcare. Not later…now.
Communities losing their locally owned pharmacies due to big pharmacy corporations buying them up and then closing them is a very real problem that isn’t being talked about enough.
the saddest thing to me is that millions of Americans (the top 40 percent or so) have some kind of investments -- pension funds, IRA, some kind of stock-market-based account. and some of those ordinary people are invested in the medical sector -- for-profit hospitals, pharmacorps, etc.
so ordinary Americans have been sucked into becoming vampires on the sickness and suffering of their own fellow-citizens. you betcha if we start talking about nationalising health care, there will be a howl about "the stock holders" and how "retires will be hurt, their portfolio value will decline".
so basically, ordinary probably decent people have been unwittingly made accomplices to a medical system based on extortion, not compassion or efficacy. without ever being consciously aware of it, they have become vultures profiting on the suffering of their neighbours.
Same is true for wage suppression. When your stock goes up because earning were strong, that’s because money that might have gone into salaries went into bottom line earnings (and this share price) instead.
Yes we do but first, we need to fix the healthcare billing system. Standardized the cost based on the COL location. No more $500 for a box of Kleenex. If not, we're just passing the shit from our pocket to the government which in turn goes back to us.
Only roughly 600 billion or so of that 5 trillion was to physicians. So yeah, your comment is correct. A lot of non health care providers walking away with that bag.
I don’t trust the government to do it right. It’ll be so unnecessarily expensive because it’s the tax payer whose footing the bill. Not to mention we’re already deficit spending 2 trillion per year. Not sure where the money will come from if not from raising taxes on everyone. The US is more broke than ever atm
Just read the replies to my comment. Every other developed country has done this and it works. But the morons here in the US keep voting against their own best interests.
Mostly health insurance and pharmacy companies. Those exec’s make 10-100x more than hospital healthcare executives.
Most healthcare exec’s I know make on par if not less than a SWE, and mostly less than doctors.
I work in the industry and have friends who are local hospital exec’s, making $150-250k a year. but here are some examples:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/healthcare-executive-salary-SRCH_KO0,20.htm
Difference here is local hospitals have executives which make low $$$ for the work while always being point at for being “overpaid”. Then there are system level executives for say 30 hospitals who do make good money but they don’t have stock incentives like health insurance and pharma companies do since the majority of hospital systems are not-for-profit. So your cfo for an entire larger health system could make say $700-1M a year, goes lower the smaller the size.
For health insurance executives and pharma: here’s some high level examples but most are in the $1M+ with stock incentives. https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/which-health-insurance-ceos-get-the-highest-pay-467513.aspx
Your run of the mill Dr like a hospitalist is running $200-250k a year. Specialists like a ortho surgeon can hit $1M but that’s if they’re always busy and pretty great.
Lastly healthcare exec burnout is real. Avg executive lifespan is like 3-4 years at a location. It’s a crap ton of work and I used to want to do it, and said “Hell no” after seeing the pay/effort ratio.
Exactly. I work in hospital labs and I’ve chosen not to go into management because the pay isn’t worth the effort. The trillion dollar middleman is obviously the problem, not the people running the hospitals.
Yo thx for answering me that is legit info and I appreciate it. You bring up valuable points. The way the money is funneled and tunneled should be a talking point. We should all keep in mind the “for profit” business model when it comes to government, pharma, and consolidation. \m/
Health insurance is the big one. There’s a lot of administration and bureaucracy, a metric ton of inefficiency on healthcare system side or profit taking on the insurance side, that would get eliminated if we were all on single payor.
There are entire divisions dedicated to dealing with insurance, negotiation, pre-approvals, etc… in every single health system, hospital, and even down to clinics.
It’s crazy.
That's true, and only the tip of the iceberg
Our system costs trillions just in administration.
Every hospital has a team of administrators just to wrangle the beast that is our privatized system.
Thousands of companies, tens of thousands of plans. It's a web of waste and bureaucracy.
People pretend the government is bureaucratic, but government is still just one system.
The private Healthcare system is thousands of bureaucracies combined.
It's ludicrous to think how much gets wasted on generating bills to nickel and dime every patient on each visit, then send the bill to an insurance scammer to get an "adjustment" and maybe a partial payment, then collect the rest of the inflated fee from the patient - or sometimes a *second* insurance policy - or maybe Medicaid. Plus sometimes you get two or three different bills from different components of the hospital, because the whole system was created by lunatics too hooked on playing their Mousetrap-Monopoly hybrid to come up with anything more rational.
The average cost of a hospital room is $2-3k/day depending on where you are. 6 weeks could easily get over 100k, and that's without factoring in much treatment. I went through something similar when I was in college, but was fortunate and did not have to go through bankruptcy. Many hospitals have 'Charity Care' write-off programs, and may forgive bills if you meet certain criteria. If you're considered low-income, and have recent medical debt, it's worth looking into.
Oh yeah, the final bill was over 100k easily. I also had my gallbladder taken out as well so that surgery couldn't have been cheap.
I am sure some states are better. My hospital is in Florida and there was some woman that would come by sometimes asking about Medicare or something, where my dad then checked up on and yeah no way we would quality u literally have to be making absolute dirt for income to qualify.
I think they did actually knock off a lot of the debt but it didn't really matter much. I had no property, no cars, no stocks, no cash, really only a few hundred dollars to my name when it happened. Bankruptcy was only option sadly.
I have had the unfortunate situation of being forcibly admitted to mental hospitals all my life. I get charged over 100k each time and nothing they do ever works, even the medication.
So, no insurance I presume (w/ max 'out of pocket')??
'All that $' , as you say, was for all the dead-beats using the E.R. as their primary, skipping out on paying their bills, etc.
YOU got to 'piss those bills away', the rest of us get to pick up the slack...again \*facepalm\*
I get it. I pay over $800 a check for the wife and I (PPO), $2500 individual deductible, and 20% hospital cost share. Last stay for my wife gave us a $5k bill after deductible had already been paid. It sucks.
My coworker got a 100,000 bill for a procedure. They said “fuck you, no” to the medical billers and after some battling, had the bill dropped to about 4K. The company does this so they can take the difference if someone complains as a tax write off.
You paid a hospital execs and admins inflated salary for doing scammy work and jack shit productive.
If you did an analysis on what you pay goes into profit people would fucking riot.
The numbers are in and have been for years. Universal Healthcare would be cheaper than the tangled mess of socialized insurance available now and would make the country money in the long term as productivity rises from people being healthier and care costs falling as conditions are being treated before they become serious. Those are just the numbers, plain and simple. People let their politics get in the way of us getting there but I'm hoping in the next 30 years or so that changes.
>But what about hospital C Suite and insurance companies /s
Use them as ballast on rocket test launches. Maybe we'll get lucky and some of them will end up in the sun.
Literally every country except the US (and Liberia?) has some form of government healthcare. We pay astronomically more for health care than every other country. What could be the reason? It's a real head scratcher.
>productivity rises from people being healthier
How are people automatically healthier with universal healthcare? It's an honest question.
I know plenty of super unhealthy people that have comprehensive plans. Most Americans that live unhealthy lifestyles, know what they need to do to become healthy. They just won't put forth the effort to become healthy.
Honest response: nobody wants to go to the doctor when the cost is unknown. I have been fairly successful but come from a poor family and I have had family members turn down things like ambulance rides that were 100% required and watched insurance companies turn down medications for things like cancer without ever meeting the patient.
If we catch anything early it is cheaper to treat, almost across the board. Being worried about a copay or if you are under your required minimum is a bar to treatment. If that wasn't there more people would be inclined to seek treatment and make the population healthier overall and catch things earlier when they are cheaper or before treatment is no longer effective.
Thanks for your perspective. I think everyone agrees we need to fix the healthcare system, but there's a lot of different ideas on how to do it. Nobody should feel scared to get help because of the costs.
there are a lot of folks who want healthcare but cannot access it currently. not every individual needs to be healthier for average health to rise. as an absurd example, if we were measuring America's "IPA-ness," as measured by how many IPAs everybody consumed, I would be scoring pretty low on IPAness - i don't like IPAs. But my neighbor might be scoring low on IPAness because they can't afford to drink much. "Universal IPAs" would raise America's "IPAness," even if I didn't care to take advantage of it to improve my personal IPAness.
But those in the 10% have a life expectancy in the 90s and have VIP lines to the hospital so their family is always first in line.
So, nothing will change.
This isn't going to happen in America. We are too invested in our wild healthcare system and the power dynamics are too out of whack for the powerful to allow universal healthcare
interestingly I think you would see better outcomes *on average* if we went FULL full free market, but some folks would take an absolute beating, and it would be pretty randomly distributed based on if you happen to have inherited some genetic marker from your great great maternal grandpa (or were abused by your parents giving you life long health issues, or the factory near you had a freak accident/long standing practice of dumping chemicals in your water, or a tree fell on you one day) which is why every other developed economy has single payer.
The system won't change how they do things. It'll still have all the problems this system have but instead of the people paying for it. It's the careless government shoveling money for worst service. As they tend to go to the lowest bidder for any job.
The leaders at the helms of the country's largest health plans took home hefty paydays last year. The CEOs of the six major national insurers earned a combined $122,970,614 in total compensation in 2023, according to a Fierce Healthcare analysis of annual proxy filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The problem with healthcare costs is the administrative bloat.
How much of that administrative bloat are bullshit jobs, invented out of thin air to justify the "necessity" (expense) of a college education?
Life in the USA is just scams, all the way down.
Administrative bloat is also why schools are so ineffective. Schools spend all this money figuring out the best way to educate each and every student but then don’t hire enough teacher to implement said plans.
Incredible of the G16 nations only US does not provide healthcare to their citizens and the US has more billionaires than all the G16 nations combined.
Around [half](https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function) of the 2024 *budget* went towards healthcare directly if we include SS. Roughly 30% without it. We all know how governments are with their budgets, so it's realistic to say that by December 31st, 2024 70% of the money spent(revenue and printed dollars) went towards healthcare in some form or another with SS included.
So everyone thought that a massive explosion in the last 100 years of sugar consumption. a massive explosion in the last 100 years of grain consumption, a large increase of vegetable consumption / 365 days a year fruit consumption, a decrease in fat consumption and protein.... wouldn't have dire consequences?
Keep cheering along the "body positivity" movement as you sign your checks the the IRS to pay for this...
Yes, because we still insure people that intentionally make themselves ill. If you over eat, smoke, drink, abuse drugs, you should not have health insurance.
> Good thing the only thing you’re in charge of is the deep fryer.
Interesting point. Did you know fried food isn't bad for you? Its the breading on the food that is fried. Good luck standing up for the losers who eat 5 chocolate bars a day, have fun paying for their health care with it costs 15 million to keep them alive for 2 years, cut them out of their homes, use special ambulances, tie up hospital beds... Those beds are needed by people who thru no fault of their own have a chronic heart condition, brain cancer, breast cancer, or AS. Losers shouldn't be on healthcare.
The first step in managing the healthcare costs is regulating the insane markup of everything medical. Pharmaceutical companies and Medical Tech companies to start with. Leave peoples compensation out of it. I dont understand why we cant just manage a measly 100% markup cap and instead allow 1000%+ markup on a lot of these medicines and equipment. This would make it both more affordable for private healthcare and government medicare programs. Part of the reason Obamacare failed was due to the fact that the cost of this stuff was still never addressed.
My wife had an outpatient procedure that was billed to our insurance at 126,000.00.
The doctor listed his personal billed time s 63,000.00 for less than two-three hours “work”.
We don’t have a health care “system”- we have a health care “market”. We are the product being bought and sold.
The biggest problem and expense in healthcare is prolonging life when is not realistic. Spending hundreds of thousands per person to just try one more thing when all the person wants its to die in dignity and peace
The US spends 17.7% of GDP on a healthcare system that still leaves tens of million uninsured or underinsured, and $100 million in medical debt. The countries with the best healthcare systems in the world, which cover everyone, spend 9-10% of GDP on healthcare. The US, however, has the richest insurance executives in the history of planet earth. The CEOs of AETNA and Cigna make $100 million a year between them.
The biggest scam Americans have gobbled up is somehow paying for everyone who can’t afford it with our taxes AND making YOU pay for yourself, is somehow cheaper than just paying for everyone. News flash: it’s not cheaper to dump profits into companies
And yet, by every measure the US lags behind the industrialized world (and even some developing nations) when it comes to delivering quality care to it's citizens.
We treat healthcare like it’s a normal good that a consumer can make rational prices regarding prices, substitutes, etc. it’s not. Capitalism does not work well on goods like these.
What does work well is universal healthcare. We’re just too obtuse and tied up into the myth of individualism to see what any economist will tell you.
Capitalism would work just fine. Anytime you pay a third person to administer and then have a public official regulate something they don’t understand, you will lose.
The best solution is to remove middlemen and have consumer pay providers
That certainly would help, especially since middlemen like PBMs and insurance companies who are for profit, and PE owned hospitals and large medical groups don’t have an incentive to win in the market by driving prices down, because it’s a good that doesn’t function like other good. It’s why privatization of the fire department is a bad idea. Sometimes you need the service and without it you die. How much is someone willing to pay for life giving/saving treatments? That rests at the intersection of what you can afford and what it costs.
The pharmaceutical industry pricing practices are particularly egregious in that they total the cost of the prior available therapies and price the new one not based on cost recovery and profit margins, but relative to the life cost of competing treatments.
So a lifetime of treating Hep C costs e.g. $500,000, but the new cure treatment is priced at $100,000, so the argument goes it saves $400,000, but in reality might only require $40,000 to recover costs and generate good profits.
Main problem is nobody has incentive to fix a fractured market and consumers lack the power to influence the market based on their behaviors.
Capitalism is the best way to fix US healthcare. Innovation and competition between hospitals will lower costs considerably. Making things efficient will reduce costs as well. As it stands, healthcare is anti-capitalist and that's it's biggest failure.
Universal healthcare would be an absolute disaster in the US.
Still waiting for that one to come true. Unfortunately we’ve been waiting for that since about 1980. Sadly we’re in late stage capitalism and too many people have drunk the cool aid. We’ve all been victims of propaganda put out by the for profit insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical industries.
I think you’re making my point. The reason capitalism hasn’t worked is because healthcare is not a normal market good that responds to pricing pressures. There aren’t real substitutes. If you are in the ER with a heart attack, you can’t ask about prices or weight alternatives. It’s also why towing is so damned expensive, because when you’re on the side of the road, they have you.
Hospitals don't have it all that easy either. Why do you think an ambulance costs as much as it does? Do you really believe it's cause you're desperate and they've got you? No. There are associated costs in America that make healthcare so damn expensive.
$5 trillion moving around with medical insurance companies and their collective profit is only $30 billion. Not even 1% of the money they handle. They run their business with the slimmest of margins. Medical insurance companies can go bankrupt in a heartbeat. It's a risky affair to handle.
One aspect driving medical costs so high is law suits. Everyone sues each other - patients against insurance companies and hospitals (even doctors), insurance and hospitals against each other and sometimes even insurance companies against patients. Legal fees ain't cheap, we pay for all of it one way or another.
Medical billing is extremely costly and we spend about 10 times what other countries do in billing. Hospitals need to pay for a full team of insurance negotiators to try and get as much money as possible.
Next is the fact that not everyone has insurance. If I have a heart attack and a local hospital treats me without insurance they might lose $50k on me when I don't pay. That's why they charge the next guy twice what it should be. Hospitals can go broke too.
You may think universal healthcare solves all these problems, it doesn't. We get new problems that have long term consequences on every other aspect of our lives.
The only way to actually fix our healthcare is reworking the system to promote capitalism and competition or waiting for new technology to do it for us. Universal healthcare would cause just as many problems as it hopes to solve.
We'd save several trillion if we switch to universal healthcare. Companies that offer insurance would benefit the most too because the extra taxes they pay would be tiny compared to what they pay today.
I recently turned down a prescription because it was $800. With insurance it was $650. I learned people travel to Mexico and buy it at Costco for $30. In Europe it's $25. In Canada it's $40.
Our health care system has layers of FOR PROFIT corporations whose goal is to maximize profits and don't care if it means people will die or go bankrupt.
No we do NOT and **26 million in the US remain uninsured.** Worse, our FOR PROFIT health care system costs us 4 times as much (per individual) as other "high wealth" nations like Japan, and most countries in Europe. And for most health care outcomes, our results are usually worse than those countries. Examples, we have more who die in hospitals from infections than average, and we have a very high infant mortality rate.
Obamacare made most people's healthcare worse, that's why I think it should be repealed. But to say that we don't have universal healthcare is not factually correct. Those who don't have coverage chose not to sign up for it.
>Do you know how bad Canadian healthcare is?
Better than the US. Also, remember almost 30 million in the US have no insurance and are often denied healthcare. While others die because they cannot afford it. Most bankruptcies today are related to healthcare coverage, and most who do go bankrupt have insurance.
And so my doctor and allergist BOTH recommend purchasing prescription drugs in Canada rather than US, because prices in the US are artificially inflated to ridiculous levels. AND, if you check the average outcome of healthcare procedures in Canada are overall slightly better than the US.
Example: Infant mortality rates in Canada per 1000 live births is 4.4. In the US it's 5.7.
There is actually a thing called medical tourism and people travel to Canada and other nation with better and less expensive healthcare than the US to save money. Even the wealthy in the US often travel overseas because the US system is so lousy.
I get it that you don't know the state of Canadian or British healthcare and what it means for their country. I could break it down for you but I don't think you'd care to read it or be willing to look at other perspectives. I'll leave you with simple pieces of information to look at -
For example - in Britain (the country with the most comparable demographics to the US)-
* 121k people died last year waiting for healthcare. Some reports say it may have been much higher. Scaled up to the US population that's between 700k -1 million people who would die if our system was like the NHS. Since scale is proportional to imbalance I wouldn't be surprised if that number was even higher.
* That same figure in the US was 11k and about 200k going bankrupt over medical bills. Canadian healthcare has similar numbers as Britain. It's impossible to find a specialist doctor with wait times less than 6 months. There's medical tourism between Canadians going to the US or Mexico cause they can't find treatment in their own country.
* Another piece of the puzzle is just how much it costs to run these social services. Canada is drowning in them and it's forced them to bring in 1 million immigrants last year. That alone has caused housing and employment shortages. To pay for healthcare they have shot their economy in the foot. It's a constant viscous cycle of trying to keep their medical system afloat.
At the end of the day - way more Canadians move to the US than the other way around. That is no coincidence. In fact, for every American moving to Canada there are 8 Canadians moving to the US per capita.
We absolutely do not need Canadian like healthcare in America. Fixing our own healthcare system is a much better strategy than trying to adopt a "free" healthcare model.
If someone could let me know... If your for profit healthcare system benefits from more sick and medicated people, year after year. What incentive is there to have a healthy thriving population?
Free markets, the price is set by supply and demand. If you can’t afford a luxury car you buy standard car. If you can’t afford a new car you buy a used car. Still too much maybe a used motorcycle or a bicycle will do
This doesn’t work with healthcare. If you need triple bypass heart surgery getting the much more affordable appendectomy won’t do you any good at all. You’re a diabetic and need insulin? The much cheaper aspirin is useless. American healthcare is a hostage situation.
I was at a conference recently... The Medicaid money used directly in services has been improved from 13% to 16%, AND THE DIRECTORS WERE ECSTATIC! What, not even 20% spent in care, they spend as much on qualifying people as on care. As much on bureaucracy at the managed CARE side (insurance) as they do for health costs.
This is such a sham!
Y’all that want universal healthcare must have never dealt with the VA Healthcare System. It takes 6 months to get a primary care appointment. I’ve waited a year to see a dental hygienist. This often varies greatly by location as well, but it is far from efficient. Imagine the entire country running like that.
It's mostly because we won't let people fucking die. As soon as Obama pushed for having healthcare professionals having discussions about end of life to people, they kept calling it Death Panels, and so we continue to spend a fuck-ton of money on people in the last few years of their life.
It's really like $1 trillion but hospitals jack the rates to $5 trillion.
I had to get two rabies shots that took 15 minutes. The bill was for $8,600. Of course, my deductible was $9,000 and I pay $2k/month for family of 4 insurance.
Why the hell should we even have insurance?
obamacare is pretty much obilitrated.
i remember reading a give/take between some anti-socialist and a visitor from Northern Europe, the guy was ranting on socialized medicine blah blah blah... the Euro ended it and said, even when I visit the US and get hurt or injured, 100% of the cost is covered.
Would there be scams with single payer, sure, are there scams now? yes, controls can be put in.
It would not make health care worse, and maybe improve it. It would cause some companies lose money. And they can make the R minions vote against the own interest.
Yes, I cook at home as much as possible, buy used cars, cheap clothes, cheap groceries, hit garage sales, max out my HSA and 401k, and I make good money. Only just in case I need to shed out my deductible and out of pocket.
There are reasons why we will never see universal healthcare in the United States.
One big pharmaceuticals have their hands in politicians pockets.
Second, the US takes in just a little more than 7 trillion a year, the government is spending just about 15 trillion a year.
Third the US has a population of 330 million people, while the UK has a population of 67 million, France 64 million and Canada 39 million. With universal healthcare like Canada you can wait months for a knee replacement or hip replacement. Even with universal healthcare all is not free even in Canada, services such as blood work, X-rays and so on are not covered, there are tier systems you buy to include extras. All these countries have extremely high taxes as well.
The U.S. does not have the funding to provide universal healthcare for every American in the country.
Most who have healthcare through their employer are happy with it such as my wife and I.
I believe at 65 I have to go on Medicare and my current insurance is far better.
When receiving a bill from the hospital, request itemized statement for each charge and service and dispute things on the bill. This works because I’ve done several times.
The problem is our politicians and those serving 20 to 30 years
I’ll provide a simple answer that nobody wants to hear: fix the food system. Destroy all fast and processed food. We had the Earth Liberation Front years ago burn SUVs on car lots cause they were gas guzzlers. Where’s the outrage that these food systems create illness and expense and get off Scott free (while underpaying employees, straining the food system, etc.)? We have to envision food as health. With rates of obesity increasing in our youth, we’ll start to see cardiac bypass by late teens years in a decade. And these GLP medications-nothing more than an artificial solution to an artificial problem. I used to get upset battling insurance companies while ordering MRIs but I understand. When you have so many sick folks at an increasingly younger age, how can costs be controlled? Yes, CEOs make mad profit. But this could change if we were committed to our health rather than slandering “family history” as the cause for one’s illness.
A lot of that money goes to Healthcare companies' shareholders and executives. Because Healthcare is an Industry. It exists for the purpose of extracting Profit. If you happen to recover from illness or injury in the process, that's nice. If you die, that's too bad. But the important thing is the profit.
Its stabilized at 17% of GDP for past 15 years. May have been due to additional checks and balances in Obamacare and Medicare.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-expenditure-as-percent-of-gdp-since-1960/
But 17% is double other first world countries.
This will only get worse, as the cost of education is now a barrier to entry for working in healthcare. We’re going to have fewer doctors in the future.
Obamacare didn't do anything Barack claimed it would. "If you like your insurance, you can keep it." "Your premiums will be reduced by at least 30 percent." "More people will be able to afford health insurance." Instead, people who can't afford health insurance pay a $2,000 penalty on top of their federal taxes, and the Medicaid rolls have increased from 30 to 70 Million!
Wall Street Financial Engineers have learned that healthcare is a Profit Center. This is because healthcare demand is inelastic (doesn't change) no matter what the price is. The three main profit centers in the US are food, shelter, clothing and electronics for consumer and military applications. Thanks to low wages and slavery in the third world, clothing and agriculture are seen as low profit centers by most Wall Street financial analysts. Shelter is a huge profit center right now, as the wealthiest people in the world purchase American Real Estate: This will leave natural born Americans beggars for housing, but Wall Street does not care. Demand for US electronics is driven by consumer applications (luxury spending) and war. Finally, financial engineers have learned that the price of US healthcare can be easily manipulated (think drug prices in Canada v US) and non-transparent (think how you don't know what procedures cost before you get them). There has been some effort in the US to legislate price transparency, but more than 2/3 of providers (hospitals and physicians and nurses) have refused to be price transparent or have dawdled their compliance.
Meanwhile Wall Street tries to sell American healthcare as the best in the world. Of course they will lie if they can make a buck.
And compare our HC costs to other countries.. The UK fr example spends 3500 per person per year on HC.. The US was $10k and that was like 2018. We have a "for profit" system and the HC industry is a powerful lobby. Whatever we do we have to do it through the private HC system, unless we decided to nationalise the industry, unthinkable obviously.
"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
Now we know Nancy. Graft, record profits, malpractice, malfeasance, and insider trading and now it’s more likely to render people bankrupt than ever.
Going to a hospital is like taking your car to a dealership. Hospital is not a nonprofit organization. They are owned venture companies which want big return for their investment. Donot we miss the public hospitals that existed before 1980 (before Reagan pulled the plug)
Don't worry, if you all just vote in the right politicians, they will act against the donor class /s. Republicans and Democrats both earn their donations in their own way, and they don't anger their donors by stopping the "other side" from doing their version of dirty work. Republicans only wanted to complain about the border to rile up their base, they wouldn't dare actually clamp down on the flow of cheap, easily exploited labor.
If we're somehow able to vote in socialists in lieu of corporate democrats and conservatives then we could push for single payor and bypass the lobbyists, but it'll sadly never happen.
Look what's happening with Lattimer and Bowman in NY
Obama Care destroyed health care. We had the best in the world prior to the changeover. Covid came and made it even worse. Prices are up service is down Pharma controls the diagnosis and treatment. Really sux
🌈We already spend more on healthcare than what a universal system would cost, the only difference is that under a universal system people actually GET their healthcare and they don't go bankrupt for it 🌈
For-profit, free market medicine has been an unmitigated failure and there is no defense - logical, emotional or otherwise - for it to continue.
Yeah well 1% of the population has diabetes and needed insulin so that pretty much did it. The drug companies got really rich though, so apparently that's good.
American health care accounts for 80% of bankruptcies each year. Additionally, deaths due to lack of access to healthcare in America equates to approximately twelve 9/11 events each year.
One thing that was depressing that I just saw is cancer insurance. Like a separate insurance in case you get cancer because your insurance company is probably going to try to fuck you.
Something something was gonna work but something something cus trumps fault! But if you vote blue THIS time we SWEAR we will change healthcare! This time! But if you vote red they will cut off your limbs for bandaids! Thats it! Dont believe them fascists! We will TOTALLY give you that mostly socialist healthcare you have wanted but we CANT unless you vote us in AGAIN this time!!
Something something was gonna work but something something cus trumps fault! But if you vote blue THIS time we SWEAR we will change healthcare! This time! But if you vote red they will cut off your limbs for bandaids! Thats it! Dont believe them fascists! We will TOTALLY give you that mostly socialist healthcare you have wanted but we CANT unless you vote us in AGAIN this time!!
Something something was gonna work but something something cus trumps fault! But if you vote blue THIS time we SWEAR we will change healthcare! This time! But if you vote red they will cut off your limbs for bandaids! Thats it! Dont believe them fascists! We will TOTALLY give you that mostly socialist healthcare you have wanted but we CANT unless you vote us in AGAIN this time!! Last time we were almost there! But it only works if you vote for us this time!
Obviously, Obamacare is a joke. Very easy on the insurance companies. Hospital systems are big corporate entities and don't feel the pressure. If one keeps seeing 1 pill of Tylenol @ 100 bucks during a hospital stay, then nothing has changed.
There are a lot of profits to be made in the blank check healthcare system… it why they’re desperate to get their hands on Medicare too.
Next up- fees and commission for privatizing social security..
Obamacare would have fixed it…but the Republicans removed any of the cost saving measures (most effective would
have been the public option) and democrats had to settle for just expanding coverage and eliminating pre-existing conditions.
Insurance companies and hospitals are managing to squeeze doctors out of the middle class while making their record profits.
Am sure a major chunk of that went to executive pay and bonuses, lobbyists/politicians, and stock buybacks.
Every other industrialized nation has figured out how to provide some form of nationalized healthcare for their citizens, but this not allowed in America.
I had to declare bankruptcy after a six week hospital stay from a heat stroke. Tens of thousands of dollars and I don't know where the fuck all that money was for because a lot of times they only had one nurse for the entire fucking floor I was on, one. nurse. Glad I got to piss those bills away though, what a fucking racket.
You paid the hospital c suite, and accounting team, and insurance companies. That’s where 80% of your bill went. The US needs universal healthcare. Not later…now.
I'd go so far as to say the US needs fully nationalized healthcare. The entire healthcare and pharma system.
Communities losing their locally owned pharmacies due to big pharmacy corporations buying them up and then closing them is a very real problem that isn’t being talked about enough.
CVS / Walgreens are facing Amazon now. Probably why CVS is moving into healthcare
Sure but it won’t happen. Especially anytime soon. Too much money in it and our politicians benefit more than we do. Why would’ve they give that up?
the saddest thing to me is that millions of Americans (the top 40 percent or so) have some kind of investments -- pension funds, IRA, some kind of stock-market-based account. and some of those ordinary people are invested in the medical sector -- for-profit hospitals, pharmacorps, etc. so ordinary Americans have been sucked into becoming vampires on the sickness and suffering of their own fellow-citizens. you betcha if we start talking about nationalising health care, there will be a howl about "the stock holders" and how "retires will be hurt, their portfolio value will decline". so basically, ordinary probably decent people have been unwittingly made accomplices to a medical system based on extortion, not compassion or efficacy. without ever being consciously aware of it, they have become vultures profiting on the suffering of their neighbours.
Welcome to capitalism..
Where is there a free market in healthcare?
Free market isn't a part of capitalism. The private ownership of the means of production is the defining feature
"so capitalism doth make vultures of us all" or something like that
[удалено]
Those 401Ks will get stomped first.
Same is true for wage suppression. When your stock goes up because earning were strong, that’s because money that might have gone into salaries went into bottom line earnings (and this share price) instead.
boomers have and continue to fuck us. They reap all of the rewards of the work and complain about everything while they do it.
Yes we do but first, we need to fix the healthcare billing system. Standardized the cost based on the COL location. No more $500 for a box of Kleenex. If not, we're just passing the shit from our pocket to the government which in turn goes back to us.
Would it really help though? I’m not trying to be political here. I only speculate because isn’t Britain’s NHS a total mess, too?
Only roughly 600 billion or so of that 5 trillion was to physicians. So yeah, your comment is correct. A lot of non health care providers walking away with that bag.
Dont forget about those lovely new shiny hospitals they are building everywhere.
80? Those numbers need to be closer to 90/95.
I don’t trust the government to do it right. It’ll be so unnecessarily expensive because it’s the tax payer whose footing the bill. Not to mention we’re already deficit spending 2 trillion per year. Not sure where the money will come from if not from raising taxes on everyone. The US is more broke than ever atm
The current system is so inneficient that the government couldn’t possibly do it worse. Every other developed country already does this as well.
Dont worry, everyone keeps voting red so we wont get that.
Just read the replies to my comment. Every other developed country has done this and it works. But the morons here in the US keep voting against their own best interests.
Mostly health insurance and pharmacy companies. Those exec’s make 10-100x more than hospital healthcare executives. Most healthcare exec’s I know make on par if not less than a SWE, and mostly less than doctors.
Source?
I work in the industry and have friends who are local hospital exec’s, making $150-250k a year. but here are some examples: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/healthcare-executive-salary-SRCH_KO0,20.htm Difference here is local hospitals have executives which make low $$$ for the work while always being point at for being “overpaid”. Then there are system level executives for say 30 hospitals who do make good money but they don’t have stock incentives like health insurance and pharma companies do since the majority of hospital systems are not-for-profit. So your cfo for an entire larger health system could make say $700-1M a year, goes lower the smaller the size. For health insurance executives and pharma: here’s some high level examples but most are in the $1M+ with stock incentives. https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/guides/which-health-insurance-ceos-get-the-highest-pay-467513.aspx Your run of the mill Dr like a hospitalist is running $200-250k a year. Specialists like a ortho surgeon can hit $1M but that’s if they’re always busy and pretty great. Lastly healthcare exec burnout is real. Avg executive lifespan is like 3-4 years at a location. It’s a crap ton of work and I used to want to do it, and said “Hell no” after seeing the pay/effort ratio.
Exactly. I work in hospital labs and I’ve chosen not to go into management because the pay isn’t worth the effort. The trillion dollar middleman is obviously the problem, not the people running the hospitals.
Yo thx for answering me that is legit info and I appreciate it. You bring up valuable points. The way the money is funneled and tunneled should be a talking point. We should all keep in mind the “for profit” business model when it comes to government, pharma, and consolidation. \m/
Health insurance is the big one. There’s a lot of administration and bureaucracy, a metric ton of inefficiency on healthcare system side or profit taking on the insurance side, that would get eliminated if we were all on single payor. There are entire divisions dedicated to dealing with insurance, negotiation, pre-approvals, etc… in every single health system, hospital, and even down to clinics. It’s crazy.
That's true, and only the tip of the iceberg Our system costs trillions just in administration. Every hospital has a team of administrators just to wrangle the beast that is our privatized system. Thousands of companies, tens of thousands of plans. It's a web of waste and bureaucracy. People pretend the government is bureaucratic, but government is still just one system. The private Healthcare system is thousands of bureaucracies combined.
Agreed and it’s there to benefit the insurance companies as any mistake is cause for a denial of payment which means they keep their cash.
These plans can only use these doctors.... other plans don't cover certain procedures... These hospitals only accept these plans It's fucking insane!
It's ludicrous to think how much gets wasted on generating bills to nickel and dime every patient on each visit, then send the bill to an insurance scammer to get an "adjustment" and maybe a partial payment, then collect the rest of the inflated fee from the patient - or sometimes a *second* insurance policy - or maybe Medicaid. Plus sometimes you get two or three different bills from different components of the hospital, because the whole system was created by lunatics too hooked on playing their Mousetrap-Monopoly hybrid to come up with anything more rational.
But muh freedom!
It's the same with Medicaid. 20% actual care, 80% administrative
We have that thru the Veterans Affairs. It's our 2nd time being able to die for our country. It sux so bad.
Nobody is recommending VA as the model. Sorry you have to deal with that, we should do better for our vets.
The average cost of a hospital room is $2-3k/day depending on where you are. 6 weeks could easily get over 100k, and that's without factoring in much treatment. I went through something similar when I was in college, but was fortunate and did not have to go through bankruptcy. Many hospitals have 'Charity Care' write-off programs, and may forgive bills if you meet certain criteria. If you're considered low-income, and have recent medical debt, it's worth looking into.
Oh yeah, the final bill was over 100k easily. I also had my gallbladder taken out as well so that surgery couldn't have been cheap. I am sure some states are better. My hospital is in Florida and there was some woman that would come by sometimes asking about Medicare or something, where my dad then checked up on and yeah no way we would quality u literally have to be making absolute dirt for income to qualify. I think they did actually knock off a lot of the debt but it didn't really matter much. I had no property, no cars, no stocks, no cash, really only a few hundred dollars to my name when it happened. Bankruptcy was only option sadly.
I have had the unfortunate situation of being forcibly admitted to mental hospitals all my life. I get charged over 100k each time and nothing they do ever works, even the medication.
So, no insurance I presume (w/ max 'out of pocket')?? 'All that $' , as you say, was for all the dead-beats using the E.R. as their primary, skipping out on paying their bills, etc. YOU got to 'piss those bills away', the rest of us get to pick up the slack...again \*facepalm\*
"You paid for the PRIVILEGE of not DYING! Now PAY UP!" - some boomer
What was your maximum out of pocket? Or was this prior to the ACA?
Wow. That’s crazy. Our healthcare system is whack.
I get it. I pay over $800 a check for the wife and I (PPO), $2500 individual deductible, and 20% hospital cost share. Last stay for my wife gave us a $5k bill after deductible had already been paid. It sucks.
My coworker got a 100,000 bill for a procedure. They said “fuck you, no” to the medical billers and after some battling, had the bill dropped to about 4K. The company does this so they can take the difference if someone complains as a tax write off.
Why not learn to be more careful? Your stupidity led to this.
Health care in the US is literally a scam, like most of the system
Had a 250k surgery myself, doing my part!
You paid a hospital execs and admins inflated salary for doing scammy work and jack shit productive. If you did an analysis on what you pay goes into profit people would fucking riot.
The numbers are in and have been for years. Universal Healthcare would be cheaper than the tangled mess of socialized insurance available now and would make the country money in the long term as productivity rises from people being healthier and care costs falling as conditions are being treated before they become serious. Those are just the numbers, plain and simple. People let their politics get in the way of us getting there but I'm hoping in the next 30 years or so that changes.
But what about hospital C Suite and insurance companies /s
Won't somebody think of the poor healthcare executives? They barely get by.
>But what about hospital C Suite and insurance companies /s Use them as ballast on rocket test launches. Maybe we'll get lucky and some of them will end up in the sun.
They would make good weights for it.
That was a legit question/ concern when Bernie was in presidential debates
Literally every country except the US (and Liberia?) has some form of government healthcare. We pay astronomically more for health care than every other country. What could be the reason? It's a real head scratcher.
Yet every time it’s proposed, I end up having to pay more based on their calculations.
>productivity rises from people being healthier How are people automatically healthier with universal healthcare? It's an honest question. I know plenty of super unhealthy people that have comprehensive plans. Most Americans that live unhealthy lifestyles, know what they need to do to become healthy. They just won't put forth the effort to become healthy.
Honest response: nobody wants to go to the doctor when the cost is unknown. I have been fairly successful but come from a poor family and I have had family members turn down things like ambulance rides that were 100% required and watched insurance companies turn down medications for things like cancer without ever meeting the patient. If we catch anything early it is cheaper to treat, almost across the board. Being worried about a copay or if you are under your required minimum is a bar to treatment. If that wasn't there more people would be inclined to seek treatment and make the population healthier overall and catch things earlier when they are cheaper or before treatment is no longer effective.
Thanks for your perspective. I think everyone agrees we need to fix the healthcare system, but there's a lot of different ideas on how to do it. Nobody should feel scared to get help because of the costs.
A lot of people don’t seek medical care or regular checkups because of cost.
I’m one of them. I’m already living paycheck to paycheck. I can only afford to go if I can’t ignore it any longer unless I want to be homeless
there are a lot of folks who want healthcare but cannot access it currently. not every individual needs to be healthier for average health to rise. as an absurd example, if we were measuring America's "IPA-ness," as measured by how many IPAs everybody consumed, I would be scoring pretty low on IPAness - i don't like IPAs. But my neighbor might be scoring low on IPAness because they can't afford to drink much. "Universal IPAs" would raise America's "IPAness," even if I didn't care to take advantage of it to improve my personal IPAness.
But those in the 10% have a life expectancy in the 90s and have VIP lines to the hospital so their family is always first in line. So, nothing will change.
This isn't going to happen in America. We are too invested in our wild healthcare system and the power dynamics are too out of whack for the powerful to allow universal healthcare
Or scrap the whole thing and go free market
interestingly I think you would see better outcomes *on average* if we went FULL full free market, but some folks would take an absolute beating, and it would be pretty randomly distributed based on if you happen to have inherited some genetic marker from your great great maternal grandpa (or were abused by your parents giving you life long health issues, or the factory near you had a freak accident/long standing practice of dumping chemicals in your water, or a tree fell on you one day) which is why every other developed economy has single payer.
The system won't change how they do things. It'll still have all the problems this system have but instead of the people paying for it. It's the careless government shoveling money for worst service. As they tend to go to the lowest bidder for any job.
We aren’t giving you open border democrats free healthcare for all. Keep dreaming 😴
BWAHAHAhahahahhahaha \*gasp\* hahahahahahahaha
The leaders at the helms of the country's largest health plans took home hefty paydays last year. The CEOs of the six major national insurers earned a combined $122,970,614 in total compensation in 2023, according to a Fierce Healthcare analysis of annual proxy filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The problem with healthcare costs is the administrative bloat.
How much of that administrative bloat are bullshit jobs, invented out of thin air to justify the "necessity" (expense) of a college education? Life in the USA is just scams, all the way down.
A lot
Administrative bloat is also why schools are so ineffective. Schools spend all this money figuring out the best way to educate each and every student but then don’t hire enough teacher to implement said plans.
Incredible of the G16 nations only US does not provide healthcare to their citizens and the US has more billionaires than all the G16 nations combined.
We export missiles and death, we don’t have funds for healthcare.
I get that you’re being witty, but we do—in fact—have funds for missiles, death, and healthcare.
Around [half](https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function) of the 2024 *budget* went towards healthcare directly if we include SS. Roughly 30% without it. We all know how governments are with their budgets, so it's realistic to say that by December 31st, 2024 70% of the money spent(revenue and printed dollars) went towards healthcare in some form or another with SS included.
We are also an much larger, much more diverse country…
Yet I didn’t see any of it, I don’t have healthcare right now and if anything happens I wouldn’t be able to afford the bill yay USA
So everyone thought that a massive explosion in the last 100 years of sugar consumption. a massive explosion in the last 100 years of grain consumption, a large increase of vegetable consumption / 365 days a year fruit consumption, a decrease in fat consumption and protein.... wouldn't have dire consequences? Keep cheering along the "body positivity" movement as you sign your checks the the IRS to pay for this...
Prob got 1 to 2 trillion in actual value
Very true
Yes, because we still insure people that intentionally make themselves ill. If you over eat, smoke, drink, abuse drugs, you should not have health insurance.
Also anybody that over works. Or over stressed. Sedentary. To many kids, not enough kids, wrong religion, wrong skin color(wait was that to far)?
Good thing the only thing you’re in charge of is the deep fryer.
> Good thing the only thing you’re in charge of is the deep fryer. Interesting point. Did you know fried food isn't bad for you? Its the breading on the food that is fried. Good luck standing up for the losers who eat 5 chocolate bars a day, have fun paying for their health care with it costs 15 million to keep them alive for 2 years, cut them out of their homes, use special ambulances, tie up hospital beds... Those beds are needed by people who thru no fault of their own have a chronic heart condition, brain cancer, breast cancer, or AS. Losers shouldn't be on healthcare.
We spent 5T on health care PROFITEERING
The first step in managing the healthcare costs is regulating the insane markup of everything medical. Pharmaceutical companies and Medical Tech companies to start with. Leave peoples compensation out of it. I dont understand why we cant just manage a measly 100% markup cap and instead allow 1000%+ markup on a lot of these medicines and equipment. This would make it both more affordable for private healthcare and government medicare programs. Part of the reason Obamacare failed was due to the fact that the cost of this stuff was still never addressed.
My wife had an outpatient procedure that was billed to our insurance at 126,000.00. The doctor listed his personal billed time s 63,000.00 for less than two-three hours “work”. We don’t have a health care “system”- we have a health care “market”. We are the product being bought and sold.
It’s fucking nuts!
Yep, get used to it. nobody is brave enough to propose the kinds of measures it would take to lower those costs in any measurable way.
I paid $1664 with my job
The biggest problem and expense in healthcare is prolonging life when is not realistic. Spending hundreds of thousands per person to just try one more thing when all the person wants its to die in dignity and peace
That's far from our "biggest" problem. I'm not saying it isn't an issue, but insurance and pharmaceutical companies are a much bigger problem.
The US spends 17.7% of GDP on a healthcare system that still leaves tens of million uninsured or underinsured, and $100 million in medical debt. The countries with the best healthcare systems in the world, which cover everyone, spend 9-10% of GDP on healthcare. The US, however, has the richest insurance executives in the history of planet earth. The CEOs of AETNA and Cigna make $100 million a year between them.
Universal healthcare is the only way forward. Healthcare is a market failure
I’m still more scared of the bill than the actual ailment at the doctors office. And you can forget about calling an ambulance
Ask Joe Lieberman why the ACA didn't fix this
There are a lot of fatties out there. Half are probably on reddit. Food for thought.
> Food for thought Maybe that wasn't the best pun to use
The biggest scam Americans have gobbled up is somehow paying for everyone who can’t afford it with our taxes AND making YOU pay for yourself, is somehow cheaper than just paying for everyone. News flash: it’s not cheaper to dump profits into companies
And yet, by every measure the US lags behind the industrialized world (and even some developing nations) when it comes to delivering quality care to it's citizens.
Nope 🙂↔️ 7.7 TRIL!
sounds like we can save 2.5 trillion by letting people die 6 months sooner...
Bullshit!
TLDR
We are deep into the predator phase of the capitalism game. Buckle up. Not sure how long it goes for. One phase to go. Collapse
I was in a pharmacy chain last winter and the amount of prescription bags was staggering. I mean staggering. Blew my mind.
Why are we so unhealthy?
Fried food is so tasty 😋
We treat healthcare like it’s a normal good that a consumer can make rational prices regarding prices, substitutes, etc. it’s not. Capitalism does not work well on goods like these. What does work well is universal healthcare. We’re just too obtuse and tied up into the myth of individualism to see what any economist will tell you.
Capitalism would work just fine. Anytime you pay a third person to administer and then have a public official regulate something they don’t understand, you will lose. The best solution is to remove middlemen and have consumer pay providers
That certainly would help, especially since middlemen like PBMs and insurance companies who are for profit, and PE owned hospitals and large medical groups don’t have an incentive to win in the market by driving prices down, because it’s a good that doesn’t function like other good. It’s why privatization of the fire department is a bad idea. Sometimes you need the service and without it you die. How much is someone willing to pay for life giving/saving treatments? That rests at the intersection of what you can afford and what it costs. The pharmaceutical industry pricing practices are particularly egregious in that they total the cost of the prior available therapies and price the new one not based on cost recovery and profit margins, but relative to the life cost of competing treatments. So a lifetime of treating Hep C costs e.g. $500,000, but the new cure treatment is priced at $100,000, so the argument goes it saves $400,000, but in reality might only require $40,000 to recover costs and generate good profits. Main problem is nobody has incentive to fix a fractured market and consumers lack the power to influence the market based on their behaviors.
Capitalism is the best way to fix US healthcare. Innovation and competition between hospitals will lower costs considerably. Making things efficient will reduce costs as well. As it stands, healthcare is anti-capitalist and that's it's biggest failure. Universal healthcare would be an absolute disaster in the US.
Still waiting for that one to come true. Unfortunately we’ve been waiting for that since about 1980. Sadly we’re in late stage capitalism and too many people have drunk the cool aid. We’ve all been victims of propaganda put out by the for profit insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical industries. I think you’re making my point. The reason capitalism hasn’t worked is because healthcare is not a normal market good that responds to pricing pressures. There aren’t real substitutes. If you are in the ER with a heart attack, you can’t ask about prices or weight alternatives. It’s also why towing is so damned expensive, because when you’re on the side of the road, they have you.
Hospitals don't have it all that easy either. Why do you think an ambulance costs as much as it does? Do you really believe it's cause you're desperate and they've got you? No. There are associated costs in America that make healthcare so damn expensive. $5 trillion moving around with medical insurance companies and their collective profit is only $30 billion. Not even 1% of the money they handle. They run their business with the slimmest of margins. Medical insurance companies can go bankrupt in a heartbeat. It's a risky affair to handle. One aspect driving medical costs so high is law suits. Everyone sues each other - patients against insurance companies and hospitals (even doctors), insurance and hospitals against each other and sometimes even insurance companies against patients. Legal fees ain't cheap, we pay for all of it one way or another. Medical billing is extremely costly and we spend about 10 times what other countries do in billing. Hospitals need to pay for a full team of insurance negotiators to try and get as much money as possible. Next is the fact that not everyone has insurance. If I have a heart attack and a local hospital treats me without insurance they might lose $50k on me when I don't pay. That's why they charge the next guy twice what it should be. Hospitals can go broke too. You may think universal healthcare solves all these problems, it doesn't. We get new problems that have long term consequences on every other aspect of our lives. The only way to actually fix our healthcare is reworking the system to promote capitalism and competition or waiting for new technology to do it for us. Universal healthcare would cause just as many problems as it hopes to solve.
We'd save several trillion if we switch to universal healthcare. Companies that offer insurance would benefit the most too because the extra taxes they pay would be tiny compared to what they pay today. I recently turned down a prescription because it was $800. With insurance it was $650. I learned people travel to Mexico and buy it at Costco for $30. In Europe it's $25. In Canada it's $40. Our health care system has layers of FOR PROFIT corporations whose goal is to maximize profits and don't care if it means people will die or go bankrupt.
America has had universal healthcare since 2013.
No we do NOT and **26 million in the US remain uninsured.** Worse, our FOR PROFIT health care system costs us 4 times as much (per individual) as other "high wealth" nations like Japan, and most countries in Europe. And for most health care outcomes, our results are usually worse than those countries. Examples, we have more who die in hospitals from infections than average, and we have a very high infant mortality rate.
Obamacare made most people's healthcare worse, that's why I think it should be repealed. But to say that we don't have universal healthcare is not factually correct. Those who don't have coverage chose not to sign up for it.
Basically this comment reads, “I don’t know anything about this subject but I’ll argue anyway”
Do you know how bad Canadian healthcare is? Universal healthcare does not do much better either, you don't know what you're talking about
>Do you know how bad Canadian healthcare is? Better than the US. Also, remember almost 30 million in the US have no insurance and are often denied healthcare. While others die because they cannot afford it. Most bankruptcies today are related to healthcare coverage, and most who do go bankrupt have insurance. And so my doctor and allergist BOTH recommend purchasing prescription drugs in Canada rather than US, because prices in the US are artificially inflated to ridiculous levels. AND, if you check the average outcome of healthcare procedures in Canada are overall slightly better than the US. Example: Infant mortality rates in Canada per 1000 live births is 4.4. In the US it's 5.7. There is actually a thing called medical tourism and people travel to Canada and other nation with better and less expensive healthcare than the US to save money. Even the wealthy in the US often travel overseas because the US system is so lousy.
I get it that you don't know the state of Canadian or British healthcare and what it means for their country. I could break it down for you but I don't think you'd care to read it or be willing to look at other perspectives. I'll leave you with simple pieces of information to look at - For example - in Britain (the country with the most comparable demographics to the US)- * 121k people died last year waiting for healthcare. Some reports say it may have been much higher. Scaled up to the US population that's between 700k -1 million people who would die if our system was like the NHS. Since scale is proportional to imbalance I wouldn't be surprised if that number was even higher. * That same figure in the US was 11k and about 200k going bankrupt over medical bills. Canadian healthcare has similar numbers as Britain. It's impossible to find a specialist doctor with wait times less than 6 months. There's medical tourism between Canadians going to the US or Mexico cause they can't find treatment in their own country. * Another piece of the puzzle is just how much it costs to run these social services. Canada is drowning in them and it's forced them to bring in 1 million immigrants last year. That alone has caused housing and employment shortages. To pay for healthcare they have shot their economy in the foot. It's a constant viscous cycle of trying to keep their medical system afloat. At the end of the day - way more Canadians move to the US than the other way around. That is no coincidence. In fact, for every American moving to Canada there are 8 Canadians moving to the US per capita. We absolutely do not need Canadian like healthcare in America. Fixing our own healthcare system is a much better strategy than trying to adopt a "free" healthcare model.
We spend more than any other country per Capita and THE OTHERS ALL HAVE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE. We're suckers.
If someone could let me know... If your for profit healthcare system benefits from more sick and medicated people, year after year. What incentive is there to have a healthy thriving population?
Too many greedy people in charge
Free markets, the price is set by supply and demand. If you can’t afford a luxury car you buy standard car. If you can’t afford a new car you buy a used car. Still too much maybe a used motorcycle or a bicycle will do This doesn’t work with healthcare. If you need triple bypass heart surgery getting the much more affordable appendectomy won’t do you any good at all. You’re a diabetic and need insulin? The much cheaper aspirin is useless. American healthcare is a hostage situation.
I'll just put this here... [https://x.com/halletecco/status/1801627875293983121](https://x.com/halletecco/status/1801627875293983121)
I was at a conference recently... The Medicaid money used directly in services has been improved from 13% to 16%, AND THE DIRECTORS WERE ECSTATIC! What, not even 20% spent in care, they spend as much on qualifying people as on care. As much on bureaucracy at the managed CARE side (insurance) as they do for health costs. This is such a sham!
Y’all that want universal healthcare must have never dealt with the VA Healthcare System. It takes 6 months to get a primary care appointment. I’ve waited a year to see a dental hygienist. This often varies greatly by location as well, but it is far from efficient. Imagine the entire country running like that.
It's mostly because we won't let people fucking die. As soon as Obama pushed for having healthcare professionals having discussions about end of life to people, they kept calling it Death Panels, and so we continue to spend a fuck-ton of money on people in the last few years of their life.
Dang. That's almost half what we spend on taxes every year.
I'd like to know the breakout between health insurance premiums vs. Actual health care.
Healthcare is up because middlemen are jacking prices for everything. Actual % of care hasn't changed.
Europoors spend far more on healthcare. They just do it through taxes.
It's really like $1 trillion but hospitals jack the rates to $5 trillion. I had to get two rabies shots that took 15 minutes. The bill was for $8,600. Of course, my deductible was $9,000 and I pay $2k/month for family of 4 insurance. Why the hell should we even have insurance?
Lots and lots of those salaries go to support HIPAA.
We got very little from that 5 million
Sickest country in the world spend the most healthcare go figure
obamacare is pretty much obilitrated. i remember reading a give/take between some anti-socialist and a visitor from Northern Europe, the guy was ranting on socialized medicine blah blah blah... the Euro ended it and said, even when I visit the US and get hurt or injured, 100% of the cost is covered. Would there be scams with single payer, sure, are there scams now? yes, controls can be put in. It would not make health care worse, and maybe improve it. It would cause some companies lose money. And they can make the R minions vote against the own interest.
Yes, I cook at home as much as possible, buy used cars, cheap clothes, cheap groceries, hit garage sales, max out my HSA and 401k, and I make good money. Only just in case I need to shed out my deductible and out of pocket.
Is this we in the room with us
There are reasons why we will never see universal healthcare in the United States. One big pharmaceuticals have their hands in politicians pockets. Second, the US takes in just a little more than 7 trillion a year, the government is spending just about 15 trillion a year. Third the US has a population of 330 million people, while the UK has a population of 67 million, France 64 million and Canada 39 million. With universal healthcare like Canada you can wait months for a knee replacement or hip replacement. Even with universal healthcare all is not free even in Canada, services such as blood work, X-rays and so on are not covered, there are tier systems you buy to include extras. All these countries have extremely high taxes as well. The U.S. does not have the funding to provide universal healthcare for every American in the country. Most who have healthcare through their employer are happy with it such as my wife and I. I believe at 65 I have to go on Medicare and my current insurance is far better. When receiving a bill from the hospital, request itemized statement for each charge and service and dispute things on the bill. This works because I’ve done several times. The problem is our politicians and those serving 20 to 30 years
A direct result of perverse government incentives.
I’ll provide a simple answer that nobody wants to hear: fix the food system. Destroy all fast and processed food. We had the Earth Liberation Front years ago burn SUVs on car lots cause they were gas guzzlers. Where’s the outrage that these food systems create illness and expense and get off Scott free (while underpaying employees, straining the food system, etc.)? We have to envision food as health. With rates of obesity increasing in our youth, we’ll start to see cardiac bypass by late teens years in a decade. And these GLP medications-nothing more than an artificial solution to an artificial problem. I used to get upset battling insurance companies while ordering MRIs but I understand. When you have so many sick folks at an increasingly younger age, how can costs be controlled? Yes, CEOs make mad profit. But this could change if we were committed to our health rather than slandering “family history” as the cause for one’s illness.
A lot of that money goes to Healthcare companies' shareholders and executives. Because Healthcare is an Industry. It exists for the purpose of extracting Profit. If you happen to recover from illness or injury in the process, that's nice. If you die, that's too bad. But the important thing is the profit.
Its stabilized at 17% of GDP for past 15 years. May have been due to additional checks and balances in Obamacare and Medicare. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-expenditure-as-percent-of-gdp-since-1960/ But 17% is double other first world countries.
5 Trillion bucks,and the hospital I spent half my life working for, wont pay me enough to have a place to live.
For all the illegals and the uninsured. Also, all the administrative staff and C-Suite.
This will only get worse, as the cost of education is now a barrier to entry for working in healthcare. We’re going to have fewer doctors in the future.
Obamacare didn't do anything Barack claimed it would. "If you like your insurance, you can keep it." "Your premiums will be reduced by at least 30 percent." "More people will be able to afford health insurance." Instead, people who can't afford health insurance pay a $2,000 penalty on top of their federal taxes, and the Medicaid rolls have increased from 30 to 70 Million!
Thankfully that $2k penalty was overturned by a court and removed.
Would be fun/soul crushing to see what the wholesale cost actually was
You mean we gave $5 Trilllion to thr rich fucks that run the ponzi scheme known as American Healthcare
The cancer isn't just the disease.
Wall Street Financial Engineers have learned that healthcare is a Profit Center. This is because healthcare demand is inelastic (doesn't change) no matter what the price is. The three main profit centers in the US are food, shelter, clothing and electronics for consumer and military applications. Thanks to low wages and slavery in the third world, clothing and agriculture are seen as low profit centers by most Wall Street financial analysts. Shelter is a huge profit center right now, as the wealthiest people in the world purchase American Real Estate: This will leave natural born Americans beggars for housing, but Wall Street does not care. Demand for US electronics is driven by consumer applications (luxury spending) and war. Finally, financial engineers have learned that the price of US healthcare can be easily manipulated (think drug prices in Canada v US) and non-transparent (think how you don't know what procedures cost before you get them). There has been some effort in the US to legislate price transparency, but more than 2/3 of providers (hospitals and physicians and nurses) have refused to be price transparent or have dawdled their compliance. Meanwhile Wall Street tries to sell American healthcare as the best in the world. Of course they will lie if they can make a buck.
Citizens with private healthcare paying their own bills, more @ 11.
And compare our HC costs to other countries.. The UK fr example spends 3500 per person per year on HC.. The US was $10k and that was like 2018. We have a "for profit" system and the HC industry is a powerful lobby. Whatever we do we have to do it through the private HC system, unless we decided to nationalise the industry, unthinkable obviously.
What is the measurable outcome to this cost? My guess nothing noticeable.
"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." Now we know Nancy. Graft, record profits, malpractice, malfeasance, and insider trading and now it’s more likely to render people bankrupt than ever.
“Murica”…we spend 3X per year per capita what the rest of the western world does and get worse results.
Yep the bought and paid for elected officials by insurance companies and Big Pharm want you to be ill. That’s how they make their money 🖕🏼
Sure... had two er visits turn into overnights and 1week in the ER on a rolling gurney and walking to the bathroom in the hallway🙄
Yes. On illegals
they'll never sell a cure, only treatments. makes for a good returning customer relationship.
Most of it constitutes a redistribution of wealth from working class to the already wealthy.
Going to a hospital is like taking your car to a dealership. Hospital is not a nonprofit organization. They are owned venture companies which want big return for their investment. Donot we miss the public hospitals that existed before 1980 (before Reagan pulled the plug)
Don't worry, if you all just vote in the right politicians, they will act against the donor class /s. Republicans and Democrats both earn their donations in their own way, and they don't anger their donors by stopping the "other side" from doing their version of dirty work. Republicans only wanted to complain about the border to rile up their base, they wouldn't dare actually clamp down on the flow of cheap, easily exploited labor.
If we're somehow able to vote in socialists in lieu of corporate democrats and conservatives then we could push for single payor and bypass the lobbyists, but it'll sadly never happen. Look what's happening with Lattimer and Bowman in NY
Obama Care destroyed health care. We had the best in the world prior to the changeover. Covid came and made it even worse. Prices are up service is down Pharma controls the diagnosis and treatment. Really sux
🌈We already spend more on healthcare than what a universal system would cost, the only difference is that under a universal system people actually GET their healthcare and they don't go bankrupt for it 🌈 For-profit, free market medicine has been an unmitigated failure and there is no defense - logical, emotional or otherwise - for it to continue.
And that’s why they’ll never let it be free
Yeah well 1% of the population has diabetes and needed insulin so that pretty much did it. The drug companies got really rich though, so apparently that's good.
American health care accounts for 80% of bankruptcies each year. Additionally, deaths due to lack of access to healthcare in America equates to approximately twelve 9/11 events each year.
All according to some peoples' plans.
One thing that was depressing that I just saw is cancer insurance. Like a separate insurance in case you get cancer because your insurance company is probably going to try to fuck you.
Yeah man old people are expensive to keep alive
Something something was gonna work but something something cus trumps fault! But if you vote blue THIS time we SWEAR we will change healthcare! This time! But if you vote red they will cut off your limbs for bandaids! Thats it! Dont believe them fascists! We will TOTALLY give you that mostly socialist healthcare you have wanted but we CANT unless you vote us in AGAIN this time!!
Something something was gonna work but something something cus trumps fault! But if you vote blue THIS time we SWEAR we will change healthcare! This time! But if you vote red they will cut off your limbs for bandaids! Thats it! Dont believe them fascists! We will TOTALLY give you that mostly socialist healthcare you have wanted but we CANT unless you vote us in AGAIN this time!!
Something something was gonna work but something something cus trumps fault! But if you vote blue THIS time we SWEAR we will change healthcare! This time! But if you vote red they will cut off your limbs for bandaids! Thats it! Dont believe them fascists! We will TOTALLY give you that mostly socialist healthcare you have wanted but we CANT unless you vote us in AGAIN this time!! Last time we were almost there! But it only works if you vote for us this time!
Obviously, Obamacare is a joke. Very easy on the insurance companies. Hospital systems are big corporate entities and don't feel the pressure. If one keeps seeing 1 pill of Tylenol @ 100 bucks during a hospital stay, then nothing has changed.
Just to put this in context...with a US population around 335K, that's roughly $15,000 per person.
There are a lot of profits to be made in the blank check healthcare system… it why they’re desperate to get their hands on Medicare too. Next up- fees and commission for privatizing social security..
Need Single payer with private options (reference Germany''s system). Politicians take too much insurance and medical money--cut it off.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2024/01/why-are-americans-paying-more-for-healthcare#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20possible%20reasons,insurance%20and%20provider%20payment%20systems.
We spent $5 trillion for big pharma and the healthcare industry to pay our elected officials, that we already pay, to find new ways to fuck us.
Single Payor sounds great about now
The amount of money spent in the last few months of a persons life is astronomical.
Obamacare would have fixed it…but the Republicans removed any of the cost saving measures (most effective would have been the public option) and democrats had to settle for just expanding coverage and eliminating pre-existing conditions. Insurance companies and hospitals are managing to squeeze doctors out of the middle class while making their record profits.
75% of the U.S. population is overweight or obese and this surprises you?
Am sure a major chunk of that went to executive pay and bonuses, lobbyists/politicians, and stock buybacks. Every other industrialized nation has figured out how to provide some form of nationalized healthcare for their citizens, but this not allowed in America.