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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Networks. The insurance MEGACORPS carve up the map like literal cartels and we all suffer because of it
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It's considered an industry, worse yet it's considered a for-profit industry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
America does not have a healthcare system, it has a system to prevent healthcare.
Insurance companies would always rather spend money on a lawyer to prevent you getting money than to spend money on your healthcare.
The healthcare business is a literal racket as well. Creating exaggerated claims with exorbitant fees is the norm, and is only getting worse despite bad press and public attention
A point you didn't hit, that healthcare is entirely reactive in the U.S. Mostly because of the high cost of seeing a doctor, but also some social reasons, we only do healthcare when we're sick or hurt. No concept of preventative medicine or even healthy people maintaining their health through healthcare. For some, seeing the doctor is a last resort after DIY self surgery.
Cuba has a doctor in every village, no matter how remote. Doctors regularly see everyone, know their neighborhood on a first name basis, and check on people's health so they can treat illness before they manifest too badly. That is simply not possible in a for profit system, not even conceivable to most.
Yeah if your insurance doesn't have the hospital system your doctor is part of in-network then you have to find a new doctor.
Conversely, if you go to a hospital that's in network, there's no guarantee that all the doctors that see you there are in network. I went to the ER once and one of the doctors who poked their head in and gave me a $50 Tylenol was out of network so I had to pay hundreds of extra dollars
Great point! Preventive healthcare of any kind is good. It's a lot easier to make sure to keep people well rather than to fix them when they get sick. However prevention isn't profitable so they don't do it, which just proves how fuckin' stupid a healthcare system driven by the desire to make money is. Preventive healthcare is so critical to wellness and vitality,.
besides being a huge scam i swear this is a deliberate way to weaken and destroy the working class as well as effectively "ration" healthcare by simply locking everyone out of it, preserving services for a minority of mostly bourgeois and petty-bourgeois as well as PMC and government employees. as the system keeps collapsing from covid, mismanagement, and sheer capitalism instead of single payer solutions it will simply become more expensive and hard to access.
AFAIK the US
healthcareinsurance system also promotes over-treatment. There is no money to be made from telling a patient that whatever they have will probably go away by itself or that the benefits of treatment doesn't really outweigh the side effects. On the other hand is good for business to do invasive surgery on terminal patients or to send people with uncomplicated bruises to get CT scannings.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 wild that Americans can't get their head around the idea that disease is infectious and can spread so it's obviously good for everyone to treat everybody. It's like leaving every individual person to ensure their house doesn't catch fire
Medical discoveries that are for the betterment of humankind are locked away behind Intellectual “property” laws.
there are people dying in Africa right now because the cures to diseases they have are copyright protected but they aren't a big enough market to justify the cost of setting up manufacturing the cures for the people who hold the copyright
Health Insurance companies deliberatly hire old crusty 80 year old white men to make "decisions" on whether people can have treatment like spinal fusion, for example. To be clear, a SPINE SURGEON has already recommend that this person recieve spinal fusion. The insurance company now decides whether it will pay for it. If they don't approve it, the surgeon will not be paid to perform the surgery.
The insurance company decision is a simple checkbox exercise based off of the "clinical guidelines" that say when someone might need spinal fusion. You either meet the criteria or you dont. For example, the spinal fusion might require 6 consecutive months of physical therapy. Missed a month? DENIED as not medically necessary.
The clinical guidelines themselves are written by ANOTHER GROUP OF CRUSTY WHITE MEN but now under the direction of the insurance company's attorneys. So you'll never see what that process looks like. I've seen it, it's embarrassingly just slow and bureaucratic.
The process is designed to obtain the slowest possible progress in medical standards while keeping the absolute minimum needed to defend against lawsuits from folks who have their treatment denied.
... under the direction of the insurance company’s attorneys. So you’ll never see what that process looks like. I’ve seen
That's another thing I forgot to mention is the amount of exterme obfuscation there in the system. They don't want you to konw what's going behind the curtain because they know it would raise questions as to how much of that nonesense is even nesscary.
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.
