In the US, its more like a mafia racket; Your money or your life.
One of my favorite things about Thailand was that the hospital lobby had these pamphlets with actual prices for procedures.
The US healthcare industry is filled with criminals. They have blood on their hands and are raking in cash at a massive cost to US society.
Resource allocation is hard. Profit isn’t the problem. Access is. We should be spending more on healthcare as a country, not less. Guaranteed health care for everyone regardless of income level can still happen in a regulated for-profit system.
USA federal government is just in general shitty at execution. I didn’t get any stimulus checks. My unemployment I was supposed to get went to some other address I never inputted into the arcane-af website I had to use to register for unemployment. A traffic ticket that should’ve only cost me $29 ended up costing $468 because the government messed up and I didn’t want to risk getting covid going to court to protest and there was no way to appeal online. I would dread these same people in charge of my health care without at least the option of switching providers.
All that happened in the past 6 months.
If our government could start getting the basics right I’d trust them with my healthcare. Maybe MfA is a great idea but it should be expanded slowly, the way Biden has suggested.
The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up.
My local hospital also cuts lots of corners to save a buck. I know some nurses who work there. They understaff while they overcharge patients and play absurd games with billing.
I think this is pretty normal in the US. The ratio of hospital beds to population is unusually small for a developed country.
As soon as my kids are a little older, I am getting out of this country. I am healthy now but as I get older I get more concerned about getting caught in the US healthcare system.
> The president od my small local hospital is paid $985,000 per year. I looked it up.
The CEO of a small local tech company is paid $10m per year. I looked it up.
> “my local hospital doesn’t allocate resources right”
Not surprising. Resource allocation is a difficult problem. Perhaps the hospital would be better off with limits on what they are allowed to pay people like you seem to be suggesting, but I doubt it.
To me this is all fundamentally a sign the USA doesn’t spend enough on health care. I don’t have confidence price controls and nationalization will improve matters.
