SirWired
SirWired
Jul 10, 2017 · 1 min read

This is one of those “simple” problems (“Healthcare costs too much”) with answers that are anything but simple.

While we can (correctly) point out all the middle-men that rake in profit, all the waste involved with a complicated and expensive system of billing and payments, highly-paid doctors, greedy pharma companies, etc., but the root of the problem comes down to that we can think of ways to provide medical treatment faster than the world economy can grow to pay for it.

In the end it will, more and more, come down to deciding how much we are willing to pay. At some point, even with universal insurance, the answer’s gonna be unpleasant decisions like “$X is better spent on a single young person than two people pushing a century” “$Y is too much to spend to extend the life of a cancer patient by a couple of months”, etc. All rational decisions to make, but cold comfort if it’s your grandma or child the decisions are about.

That said, if we’d just admit that single-payer (maybe with something like Medi-gap) is about 50x better than what we have now and get on with it, we could forestall those decisions for a while longer.

    SirWired

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    SirWired