• In America the idea of a healthcare "marketplace" is a thing. A "market" is great tool for the organization of competing enterprises, it shouldn't be a place where healthcare is organized. Price, cost, quality, availability, and distribution should be left up to a tool whose sole propose is to maximize profit.

  • Healthcare is totally individuated. Healthcare should be considered a public health issue and treated as such. We should all chip-in to a public health fund and we should all be able to use it.

  • It's so expensive. Even a simple check-up can run you upwards of $100, when you're basically just running diagnostics on yourself. One's health outcomes shouldn't be directly tied to their wallet.

  • The fact it's treated like a commodity. Our physical and mental well-being isn't like a new widget or subscription to a service. We should not have to "compare" healthcare providers like movie reviews, we should simply look the services they provide and have some assuredness that they provide top-notch healthcare services.

  • Healthcare is too often directly tied to your "level" of employment. Two people can have the same condition, but one person could person may not get the treatment they need and deserve because they don't have a job that allows to access healthcare.

  • Networks. The insurance MEGACORPS carve up the map like literal cartels and we all suffer because of it

  • It's considered an industry, worse yet it's considered a for-profit industry.

  • The lobbyists, MEGACORP suits, and other fiends that make the rules around healthcare with zero experience or understanding of healthcare. They are an army of gray blobs that are mercenary middle-men that stand between us the care we deserve.

    • Sure they may be the "Head of Logistics and Intern Harassment" but they don't mean they should even get a say in how healthcare is provided, what counts as healthcare, and who gets to gets what. Doctors, nurses, researchers, and other learned folks should be the ones making the rules about healthcare. Not the moneyed malefactors who directly benefit from making healthcare worse.
  • Medical discoveries that are for the betterment of humankind are locked away behind Intellectual "property" laws. I don't care if a cure came from the a graduate student team from University of Alaska or a private research lab in Nigeria; if it's for healthcare it should be open-source. IP law doesn't do anything but protect the already wealthy.

  • Being alive is a full-time endeavor. Maintaining a body healthy or otherwise is requires constant care but so much of societies organization forces to neglect the very vessels we use to navigate through life.

  • Our narrow understanding of healthcare. Our health outcomes are more than just our genetics, there a multitude of factors that impact health but because it is not a form of a pill or a vial we don't consider it healthcare.

  • The fact that places like gofundme.com exist as a primary means of getting healthcare is one of the greatest failing of the modern era I can imagine. Of course things like charity, giving, mutual aid, and taking care of each other are good and virtuous things to do; However, the idea that the internet must rally together to give some the funds to some in need is a failure. A site like gofundme.com shouldn't have people asking the vast sums people sadly begging for, it a depressing indictment of the state of things.

  • All of this is exponentially worse for minors as their health outcomes are directly linked to their parents or guardians ability to navigate all of the above.

Feel free to add to this list. We all deserve better than what we are getting. I mean everyone too, the global north and south, east and west, everyone who looks like me and everyone who doesn't. We should be able to live healthy lives and capitalism is direct conflict with that.

  • HamidAbbasi [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I split spend most of the year in Colombia and the medical system there is in crisis yet way higher quality than the care you receive in the USA, also free.