alt Hacker NewsTangentially related, but it is increasingly obvious that there's an ever-growing chasm between these two aspects of medicine in the U.S.:
- What's possible for medical professionals to do for certain conditions, in large part due to the amazing levels of investment into research and implementation.
- How difficult it is for ordinary people to receive care. Primarily due to private insurance companies intentionally making it more difficult to get care.
Like the fact we're giving stem cell therapy to fetuses successfully is amazing, yet any time I go to a doctor's office or bloodwork company I hear an elderly person explain to the front desk person that they've been on the same insurance for decades and only recently started receiving bills they can't afford, or listening to the front desk person explain that now medicare no longer covers them for a routine thing.
Ideally, we could have both great research _and_ great general care in this country. I just don't know if I will ever see that day.
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Does that really happen "any time you go to a doctor's office"?
That aside, what if novel therapies like this are linked to the fact that US healthcare is expensive? If you make it cheap -- as in other countries -- there's less incentive for companies to invest and you get less research and fewer breakthroughs. Also fewer doctors, hospital beds, and more rationing.
In an ideal world, everyone would have exactly the right amount of healthcare. But our world isn't ideal, it runs on incentives, and it's not clear to me that all the hand-wringing over US healthcare will lead to positive changes.
The US is a country of cowboys. There is literally nothing that can be considered fair. The only thing what is left is the kindness of it's people. If that detoriates, well...
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I think the largest issue with health care right now is that the US is artificially shrinking the supply of Doctors. This is due to:
1. Size of medical school classes not increasing with population
2. US has an artificially small amount of residency slots.
These are largely due to AMA lobbying afaik and bad bills. But if we allowed every qualified medical student to enroll, and gave a residency slot to every graduate. In a decade we would have really shrunk the gap.