Your comment has been edited extensible since you first posted some misleading numbers, so I'm adding this new comment on one of your additions:

> As long as a profit motive exists, there will be incentives to reduce or avoid care for more profits.

This is reversed from reality. Insurer incentives are to increase care and costs all the time. Their profits are tied to a fixed percentage of total expenditure, so the only way to increase profits is to increase costs.

Start replacing cheaper scans with MRIs, etc. Then profits rise.

Look throughout the entire system, and everybody's incentive is to perform more healthcare. That's the profit incentive throughout the system, from care providers to test providers to insurance companies.

That's a major (but not only) reason healthcare expenditures are such a high percentage of GDP compared to other countries, why healthcare expenditures are $5T per year in the US.

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toomuchtodo 4 days ago | parent [-]

I mean no disrespect whatsoever, but we have no common ground if the belief is a continued for profit system or more profits are going to fix any of this, based on the overwhelming evidence. At some point, one must admit that the US has entirely failed at a functional healthcare system considering the costs compared to care delivered and outcomes. If for profit insurer incentives are to increase costs as you say, we must eliminate insurers and fulfill any need for that function through public systems, where cost controls can be implemented to drive down costs. Incentives drive outcomes. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

From another comment I posted in this sub thread: https://www.kff.org/health-policy-101-international-comparis...

Additional citation: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

> Goal: Compare health system performance in 10 countries, including the United States, to glean insights for U.S. improvement.

> Methods: Analysis of 70 health system performance measures in five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.

> Key Findings: The top three countries are Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, although differences in overall performance between most countries are relatively small. The only clear outlier is the U.S., where health system performance is dramatically lower.

> Conclusion: The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.

	▲	epistasis 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I literally do not care at all if there's a profit based system or not. It is completely immaterial to me. Both profit driven system and non-profit systems are successful around the world at delivering universal care. That you are more focused on profit than on providing care to people is a definite difference. It is funny that you somehow think you could be disrespecting me in this exchange, because I think that putting people first is the only defensible position, and that your position of prioritizing a particular political bent over the health of people is ultimately extremely disrespectful to people and incompatible with leftist politics, liberal politics, or basic human decency. Tl;dr putting profits over people is wrong, but so is putting profit-elimination over people. People first, everything else comes from that.