[1] https://www.kff.org/medicaid/medicaid-financing-the-basics/#...
[2] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-medicare-cost-the...
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/top-100-us-hos...
The only problem? No one has the political will to do it.
> Someone is charging way too much for goods and services
It's more money chasing meager supply. They're charging market rates. However when the market is distorted through the described arrangement, it's clear what has to change - the structure of international finance.
For example, Medicare is launching a new program in July that pays a fixed rate for achieving defined outcomes, like lowering blood pressure or cholesterol. Medicare's explicit goal here is to create incentives to automate the repetitive parts of care delivery with software. (Much of preventive cardiology is surprisingly algorithmic and guideline-driven, so this is more plausible than it seems.)
This reverses the incentives of the current system, where CPT codes incentivize doing more "stuff" (but not necesarily delivering the most effective care efficiently).
If you're a software engineer who cares about health, and have been sitting on the sidelines till now, I think the next few years are a really interesting time to make a contribution.
How many times have I heard this, about how many techs. But this time for real?
Health spending in the us is too tied up with the country’s economy for it to ever be reduced. Same goes for housing. The cost of both of these will continue to increase. As long as the investor class is satisfied, this is all that matters.
These are massively incomparable. Most householders live in homes they own. Those homes, moreover, are usually a substantial if not dominating fraction of their net worth. And they're leveraged. This produces a broad level of interest in maintaning or raising home prices.
Healthcare is more narrowly owned. It's not as leveraged. And very few housholds have a commanding fraction of their net worth in healthcare assets.
Most healthcare in America isn't paid for by the patient.
do you have thoughts on what that looks like? what does the hiring landscape look like?
There is so much to be done and it is not going to be solved by any one thing. That in mind, something like an independent third party patient advocates / advisors would be great. It is hard to be an informed patient these days, Navigating insurance and paperwork is tough and getting second opinions is sometimes had.
The only thing that will fix American healthcare is absolute abolishment of private insurance. That's it. No amount of gentle incentive tweaking or whizbang technology is going to solve the fundamental problem of human greed and immorality.
Allowing private health insurance to exist is inhumane and can only result in profit extraction and exploitation of the most vulnerable members of society whose only options are literally to pay up or die.
That's the break. We've allowed profit-seeking individuals to stand in between citizens and literal life saving medicine. And you think the solution to that is to add more middlemen and profiteering exploitative corporations. Utter insanity.
The solution is to make it illegal for anyone to say "no, you may not have this life saving medication or proceedure". The solution is to remove profit from medicine. To allow profiteering and gatekeeping of people's very lives is immoral in the extreme. Giving more private corporations more influence is insanity. The solution is less private influence of medicine, not more.