alt Hacker NewsAmericans just consume a lot of healthcare services. Any substantial cost savings requires providing less healthcare service.
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Something like 20% of healthcare services are "low value care" which aren't justified by evidence-based medicine criteria and may even harm the patient. Regardless of the financing system we could free up a lot of capacity and slash costs by eliminating that low value care. Of course in practice it's difficult to do that at scale.
In some cases they are provided healthcare services without a choice, so they're not really "consuming" those services. E.g. tests that don't change outcome but do cover a provider from a legal risk.
Citation needed (per capita please).
Given that people constantly, literally AVOID care because they can’t pay for it until it’s such an absurd problem that it’s very, very expensive, I struggle to believe this, at all.
And money amount doesn’t matter in this evidence because, again, Americans regularly avoid care until it’s catastrophic because they literally can’t afford it and/or have to wait for insurance to meet a certain harm level threshold where it literally can no longer be argued (emergency care)
That's not necessarily true; fewer limitations on who is allowed to provide health service and manufacture medicine and health technologies would also drop prices. Competition in healthcare is very, very difficult because it's often illegal to compete.