GrymEdm , (edited )
@GrymEdm@lemmy.world avatar

That is just restating the argument. There's nothing new in that response and I addressed the flaws of the idea that a richer country should = more expensive health care. It's not as if healthcare costs have some inherent reason to increase along with wealth. As an analogy, paying 50 dollars for electricity while earning 1k/month doesn't justify paying 5,000 for the same electricity usage while making 100k/month - it's 50 dollars' worth of electricity either way. Most glaringly, if healthcare is priced based on what the market will bear it excludes/punishes many folks by making care more expensive (as a %) the further down the ladder you are. It's the market model you'd expect for an optional product, not a life-defining essential.

US citizens aren't even getting "more" for the extra cost. The JAMA article I posted states that a) Americans utilize healthcare at largely the same rate as cheaper countries and b) the extra cost is primarily due to increased pricing of labor/goods and administrative expense. Expensive privatized healthcare resulting in huge amounts of medical debt is a solvable industry-created problem that the USA's peer countries have reduced or avoided entirely. If a Canadian and American live near the border, on average the Canadian pays half as much per year (link here again for convenience), is guaranteed coverage, and lives 3 years longer than the American a few kilometers away. While life expectancy is undeniably decided by multiple factors (certainly more than just healthcare quality), we can say for sure that Americans are not getting appreciably more frequent health care nor are they living longer than their neighbors for all that they pay double.

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