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Re: louieblouie post# 152275

Thursday, 10/25/2018 10:36:00 AM

Thursday, October 25, 2018 10:36:00 AM

Post# of 428589
Working in industry, you see both sides of the coin.

Both the single-payer system and the US Privatized system have very different pros and cons - ultimately there is no perfect system and either system requires huge compromises.

The US system is extremely expensive - nobody can deny that. Even many doctors think the price of healthcare is ridiculous (although they're not going to give up their fat paychecks).

For that (absolutely massive) sum of money, what we get in return is the bleeding edge of health sciences and the best and most stringent (also the most frustrating as we saw with AMRN) drug regulatory standards on the planet. There is a reason why the Thalidomide scandal didn't happen in the US.

Trump is right in that US drug prices are extremely high because we subsidize the rest of the world, but the US also gets the best healthcare first. Experimental therapies? Most of them are in the US. The best surgeons and drugs? US first. Research into exotics like cannabinoids? Legalized first in single-payer Canada but you bet that the bulk of key research is done in the US, not liberal paradise Canada.

You're even more out of luck if you're into more elective procedures less life-threatening, more quality-of-life stuff like orthos, cosmetic, ophthalmology, etc. The most skilled surgeons are in the US. You don't see much high-end research into stuff like ACL rejuvenation or LASIK in places like the UK or Canada. The best English soccer athletes come to the US to fix their injuries ASAP, not queue in the NHS (where they'll be asked to take 2 aspirins and call them in 6 months if it still hurts).

However, the ugly flipside to that is that the US system is also hugely inefficient and there is a lot of waste in healthcare as a ton of money goes not just to healthcare professionals and investors but in the administrators and support services like malpractice etc that would largely not exist in single-payer.

In addition because the US healthcare providers do not have scale like in Canada (some of the largest companies in the US have only hundreds of hospitals at most vs almost 2000 in Canada), they lack negotiating power and the economies of scale.

There is also a lot of replication, creating waste in the system. If there are 2 hospitals in your town, both run by different companies, each requires their own administrative setup, supply chain & logistics etc while in single payer the government only needs to set one up. There definitely is a lot of scope for reducing inefficiencies in the US model.
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