Anonymous asked: Why is healthcare harmful? Do you mean actually treating diseases/injuries is harmful on average (or not worth it), or just the entire system around that?
Healthcare in the US is a massive waste of resources and spending tax money on it is thus harmful. Singapore is able to get better results for poor people and cover all of its population at a fraction of what the US spends on a fraction of its population (per capita, obviously; Singapore spends approximately 1/3 of US public healthcare spending on all healthcare, of which around half is tax money).
In fact, the situation is so bad that even western european countries that provide public healthcare for all their citizens a lot less efficiently than Singapore nonetheless end up paying less per capita than the US spends tax money on Medicare+Medicaid alone.
Thus, it’s totally possible to deliver far better outcomes while cutting the public healthcare spending to 200B a year, all it takes is the will to do it.
Unfortunately democracies tend to be really bad in the “will” department and thus I don’t really see a way to reform the current system. The only real way forward I could imagine is radical and sweeping cuts and privatizing the system into “private as in privacy”, extreme deregulation of healthcare (enough to make sure deregulatory capture doesn’t end up being a problem, and by that I mean “enough to make 90% of the population scared shitless”, because lesser deregulation is just immensely ripe for capture by politically favored special interests, as has been seen in many countries), and providing people enough free money so they can afford to buy their healthcare on the newly-freed markets. It would be painful, it would look terrible as many people would suffer through no fault of their own, but in the end it would render healthcare actually affordable even to poor people.
2 weeks ago · 2 notes · .permalink
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