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whimsicalism | on: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
graft but also overutilization/misallocation, ie. we will publicly spend massive portions of our GDP treating old people who are slowly dying but little on younger people who have some crippling illness, mostly because older people vote and triage is an uncomfortable concept to people
willcipriano | parent
Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to deal with that. Given the US is 48th in life expectancy[0] behind all these other nations that spend much less, that explanation doesn't seem to hold much water.

[0]https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

whimsicalism | root | parent
> Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to deal with that.

well not every other nation, but i know what you mean.

other nations are much better at managing overutilization by denying care where it is not needed. the US insurance system shields people from cost and encourages overutilization due to a number of stupid policy choices (aka refusal to have 'death panels' like in Canada/UK but also refusal to do away with massive publicly subsidy for health expenditure).

for a personal story, my parents basically get free MRIs from the state for little reason whereas people I know have to pay an arm and a leg for MRIs because their insurance is worse. at minimum, we could at least also make my parents have to pay an arm and leg for useless MRIs and doctors would stop encouraging them or lose patients.

willcipriano | root | parent
MRIs only cost that much in the US[0](2015 prices: $1,145 in America and $138 in Switzerland), everything is inexplicably ten fold more expensive here. That more expensive care doesn't result in ten fold better outcomes as all the health measures you can find indicate. That's the root of the problem and the thing is no politician[1] is really willing to address it and they don't really cover it clearly on the news[2], I wonder why?

[0]https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6104533/the-125-percent-solutio...

[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summ...

[2]https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/hey-big-spenders-phar...

s1artibartfast | root | parent | next
Correct, you have identified the problem. Prices are high because there is no agent in the US system looking to allocate spending on the basis of cost and health returns. The closest we come is the much hated insurance denials.
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whimsicalism | root | parent
the overutilization story is what explains this, you cannot simply walk into Switzerland and say "I want an MRI here is my $138", but that is essentially what you can do (delta a bit of doctor shopping) in the US. there also is a lot of bad price transparency in the US so the listed price is not the price ended up paying, again this is due to the problem I identified above about shielding costs.
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