This is unfortunate, but what do you want to do, have the government pay for it? Maybe there are a lot of people with cancer who will get better and live for X number of years. But many people are going to die in a year or two and we would just end up spending millions of dollars on them, essentially wasting the government's money. How much money would you spend to increase someone's life by a minute, an hour, a day, a month, etc?
And if there was a maximum amount the government was willing to pay, then people would just be talking about how the government is deciding the price of life. Maybe you could devise a fair system in which every individual has a certain dollar amount allocated to all the healthcare in their life, and then if they go over that, they would have to pay it themselves. But I think people would be upset about that as well.
At the end of the day, every system we create (bridges, power plants, cars, etc) is implicitly or explicitly deciding the price of a human life. People are uncomfortable with that idea, so they try to think of things in different terms.
Our healthcare system is broken, but not for the reason people think. It's broken because it's this public-private Frankenstein monster of rent-seeking, self-dealing, and corruption. It was terrible to begin with, but Obamacare made it so much worse. The system has become so complex that the government can't properly model or anticipate how legislation would affect the long-term stability of the system. Over the years, the government has legislated bug fixes over bug fixes, patches over patches.
What needs to be done is replace this horrible and inefficient beast with a completely free market system. Just get rid of all of the laws and start anew. I guarantee you that the free market would be able to offer reasonably priced insurance plans that would service a variety of needs.
The solution isn't free healthcare for everyone. The US government does not have the money to even begin to do something like that.
What do other wealthy states with populations who generally prefer their healthcare system to one like ours (the US) do? That'd be a good place to start looking. Plenty of examples. Like, all of them, pretty much.
> The solution isn't free healthcare for everyone.
Color me skeptical that our healthcare system contributes to our being more innovative than our peers. Looking at the way it distributes risk (bumpily and with little certainty) and the immense cost of it, I'd expect precisely the opposite.
> Clearly our system is bad, but there are multiple ways to skin a cat.
I'd love to see a hyper-free-market system work for this. It'd be great. So much simpler. I'd like to see it happen somewhere else first, though. Meanwhile all our best examples are not that and I'll take something working in practice over working in theory any day.
And if there was a maximum amount the government was willing to pay, then people would just be talking about how the government is deciding the price of life. Maybe you could devise a fair system in which every individual has a certain dollar amount allocated to all the healthcare in their life, and then if they go over that, they would have to pay it themselves. But I think people would be upset about that as well.
At the end of the day, every system we create (bridges, power plants, cars, etc) is implicitly or explicitly deciding the price of a human life. People are uncomfortable with that idea, so they try to think of things in different terms.
Our healthcare system is broken, but not for the reason people think. It's broken because it's this public-private Frankenstein monster of rent-seeking, self-dealing, and corruption. It was terrible to begin with, but Obamacare made it so much worse. The system has become so complex that the government can't properly model or anticipate how legislation would affect the long-term stability of the system. Over the years, the government has legislated bug fixes over bug fixes, patches over patches.
What needs to be done is replace this horrible and inefficient beast with a completely free market system. Just get rid of all of the laws and start anew. I guarantee you that the free market would be able to offer reasonably priced insurance plans that would service a variety of needs.
The solution isn't free healthcare for everyone. The US government does not have the money to even begin to do something like that.