This is despite Americans’ enormous spending on healthcare, which is in a league of its own – inflated by a large private, profit-driven medical industry that charges patients and their insurers an arm and a leg every time they come into contact with the system, regardless of whether the intervention does any good to their health
Like the US’s disturbingly profound poverty, its over-the-top mortality is not due to some technical shortfall or economic constraint. It is a choice. The United States is not only rich. It is better at inventing newfangled drugs and therapies than probably any other country in the world. What it is terrible at is ensuring that its people, even the poor ones, have access to the basic building blocks of a healthy life – from decent jobs and humdrum amenities like potable water, to access to health insurance.
American death and destitution are intimately connected. From the country’s fentanyl addiction to its obesity and its many suicides, often its most deadly afflictions do not call for fancy healthcare technology. It’s the social contract that must be fixed.
Someone in my friend group is convinced that things will get so bad people will demand radical change. He thinks that’s the path to socialized healthcare. I don’t think this country has the spirit to reach for great things.
Historically, great changes are usually preceded by mass mortality events.
Historically the countries where that happened, if they were in this US situation they’d have done that decades ago. The spirit of not tolerating manufactured hardship, that is present in those population, does not seem to be present here.
Sounds like copium. It’s one thing to think that’s a possibility, but to be convinced that it will happen? Eh…
He thinks too highly of people. But more importantly most people get healthcare through their employers, and high prices can easily be blamed on those employers. Most people are not directly affected by aca cuts, it’s only those others
