this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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How I've been looking at it lately is that the issue is in the fact that the hospitals profit when you are sick rather than profit when you are well, and not simply the fact that the hospitals can profit from your care. A possibility that I've heard thrown around is running a hospital on a subscription service. That way the hospital will profit when you are not in it. Unfortunately, this is not without it's issues.
The answer is to stop treating the hospital like it's something that needs to be for profit. That's something we as a species and society could easily support
But muh prawfits!
It's not that healthcare fundamentally needs to generate profit, it's that profit spurs competition, and, thus, innovation. I'm open to counterarguments, but I'm not sure that purely public healthcare can generate the same levels of innovation as purely private healthcare.
I think you've just described the national health service. As a citizen of the country you pay taxes throughout your working life and the health care from the NHS is free at the point of delivery. It's a membership.
Exactly, healthy citizens pay into coffers so more can remain healthy and keep society functioning. I don't know how Americans can be so deluded that you should inject profiteering into healthcare.
Isn't that what insurance is? Also wouldn't it incentivize hospitals to kick you out even before you have healed?
The only solution is a state owned universal Healthcare system.
They would want you to pay for as long as possible so they would want you healthy.
Anyway as someone else pointed out it's just a roundabout way of saying they want universal healthcare, as that's exactly how it works, you pay a "subscription" through your taxes, get access to all hospitals for free and they have the incentive to keep you healthy because that's how they guarantee people are there to pay taxes. Yes it's pretty much the same thing as private insurance, without the "for profit" part and with a monopoly in the hands of an entity that doesn't have the goal is maximising profits so they can force companies to sell their services for the price they're willing to pay.
Currently, I'm not big on insurance. Like loans, it separates the consumer from the product. A consumer's reluctance to directly pay for a product is what drives down prices.
Yeah, like I said, it's not without its issues. Perhaps, when then patient is admitted to the hospital, a contract is simultaneously created which is an agreement between the hospital and patient that they will go through the full treatment required to help them. If the patient is removed prematurely, then the patient can file a lawsuit against the hospital for breach of contract.
In my country we actually do that. Everyone subscribes. An added benefit is that the companies that the sick people work in get higher profit because they get healthy workers back who don't spend all their time thinking about their crippling debt.
That's kind of how HMOs like Kaiser work. They are really good at dealing with issues that could get severe. But things that are not going to turn into something that will cost them money they don't really do a good job at, such as mental health care. Diagnosing you with anxiety or ADHD and prescribing you drugs for it just costs them money, so if they can make it super hard for you to get the diagnosis then they don't have to spend it. It's not really something that will eventually land you in an expensive hospital stay or long term PT.
That's why healthcare should fundamentally be done as a public service as opposed to for profit.