It will not change on your time horizon. If you want better healthcare, move to a developed country today. It will take a half decade or more for US healthcare to improve in any meaningful capacity, assuming the necessary events take place to enable improvement in the system.

(to improve US healthcare, laws will need to change; when those laws change is a function of election outcomes and cadence; those election outcomes are a function of the electorate, who they vote for, and the rate of cohort turnover; think in systems)

Probably 3 of them just working to prevent you from going.

I think the industry itself would be more than happy to classify nurses and doctors as non-essential and drop them.

Imagine the profit margins where you don't have to pay salaries to them.

Right, most of those 6 are not medical staff, they are probably there for insurance and billing. And compared to Europe we don't even have a lot of doctors, US has fewer per capita. So the money is going to the billing layer, not to actual care.

Those people may actually be saving money by offloading work from a $250/hr doctor to a $25/hr secretary.

> US healthcare industry needs to drop more non-essential workers, and invest more in workers that produce value.

Only problem is you can’t destroy the jobs program. Someone pointed out to me that

For someone without and particular skills, credentials, network, medical industry jobs provide one of the last few steps to a stable, middle class life that’s also accessible to working class. In other words, it’s one of the last vessels for any sort of social mobility.

That's almost entirely due to how our private insurance industry works.

Any given health provider has to deal with thousands of different insurers, and it's not uncommon for individual patients to have primary, secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary insurers the provider then has to deal with to get paid for a procedure.

To keep health care workers focused on providing health care, providers hire a bunch of administrative workers whose job is to offload the work of haggling with insurance onto cheaper workers, but because there's so many insurers, and patients have so many layers of insurance, you end up with something close to 10 administrators per doctor.

Alas, because there's so much money sloshing around in the system, and because the US government is so thoroughly corrupt with bribes from special interests, there's no movement to correct the problem. The system is unsustainable, though, so it will inevitably collapse in on itself at some point, causing a lot of misery and probably death before anything is fixed.

Every country has for-profit elements in their healthcare system. The USA is uniquely dysfunctional in its governance. There is regulatory capture at every level.

> The US had the second-highest avoidable mortality rate—deaths caused by conditions that can be prevented with primary care or treated with timely medical intervention. Only Mexico had higher avoidable mortality. Similarly, the US also had the second-highest rating on years of potential life lost, a measure used to estimate premature death. Again, only Mexico had a higher rating.

About 41k people die on the road in the US per year. While this is very high, and worse than pretty much any other developed country, it’s not going to move the needle _that_ much.

Which only leads us to another problem: food.

You can't have a healthy society if all policies are dictated by corporations.

>There’s always talk of freedoms and being brave and being the best country in the world to live in, but very, very little effort of action to improve anything.

Its all just talk.

Our country is captured by the top 1% of wealthy donors who are making a killing off the healthcare industry. Americans as a population aren’t putting up with anything, they just have no control. A citizen shot a healthcare executive in the street a couple years ago, that’s what people are resorting to now.

To be fair, the French riot in the streets when one of their teams win the Champions League[0]. I'm not sure it's a good metric.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r2ejg1w9xo

Among many, there is a zero sum attitude. This goes back to the founding and slave owning in the south.

As an American, no. Well aside from - yes a significant part thrives on seeing others than them suffer. Years ago, I spent multiple times a year at a B&B on the Hilo side of the big island. The host was one of the last "Grand Dame's" of Hilo. She was a cattle rancher that knew Roosevelt; her husband had been a friend of Linus Pauling. She did hikes in her 70s and 80s few in those ages can do now.

She was grandfathered under a form of medical insurance - I think older Blue Cross/Blue Shield - none can access now. At one point, the US did have better health care than we do at the moment. The fcking idiot boomers (including my parents) bought into the BS from Nixon, Reagan, etc. Hey - (good or bad) - let's stop allowing one to write off debt, but allow companies to do so, etc.

This country does have it's head up it's ass and a significant number blame everyone but themselves and how they vote.

We pay more (as a country) by a

lot* and get significantly less for our medical coverage. Want to go self employed with a family of 3? Want a PPO? $4-6k/mo in California right now. Deductibles will be high.

you seem jealous at american stock market and high tech salaries. european?