The reason for excessive healthcare costs inflation in the world. Pharma companies and new medtech companies pocket most of the increase with new and better products to prolong life. Most new products just delay the inevitable, but those with medical insurance with full riders demand the best because '$$$ no-issue', everything covered by blank cheque from insurance. People who need 100% nursing assistance and used to die in weeks-months now STILL NEED 100% assistance but take years to die, thanks to TLC or new inventions that don't really make an old sick person much stronger/ healthier (maybe a bit better) but costs a bomb to obtain/prescribe. New cancer immunotherapy chemotherapy (SGD20,000/mth) is more effective but mostly cannot cure patient, so patient has to take meds for life or untill ineffective wherein which case, hopefully a new option (even more expensive) can be found. As long as FDA approves new drug/device, share price of healthcare tech company will increase and everyone along the gravy chain from lab scientist to CEO to hospital staff will get pay/ dividend $$$ increase. Thus, the marginal health benefit is not worth the increase healthcare costs but desperate people (especially those on comprehensive insurance schemes) will pay any price no matter how unreasonable / exorbitant ... This is the reason for runaway inflation in healthcare costs in most places in the world. And the sad part, many of these treatments provide only marginal improvement and are really not worth half the amount of $$$ spent. Anyway, many healthcare insurance companies are now in the red because doctors and hospitals are more suave businessmen, swindlers and scaremongers than the insurance agents themselves ... amongst the black sheep of society, in hospitals and doctors have insurance agents met their match.
The root of our troubles is that the financing of health care is built upon a profit making model. Health insurance does not exist to provide health care, it exists to generate profit. This is fundamentally flawed, the two goals are not compatible. Back in the 1880's Germany faced this problem and made a moral choice. The choice was that human life was too important to allow the financing of health care to be ruled by the profit motive. For that reason the world's oldest system of national health insurance in one of the most capitalist economies in the world is non-profit. There is a great deal more to this of course, many details and complexities. The important point to understand is their system has worked continuously for over 130 years. Thru wars, the collapse of empires, many economic turmoils. The German system is noteworthy for its age and success, but all the systems used in Europe are worth study. All are lower cost with more people covered and better outcomes than what we experience.
Yup. Healthcare and the profit motive should never be mixed. They are completely contradictory. The notion that a privatized system means competition is a theory, and the notion that competition is the solution is even a less realistic theory. Simple observation of logical expectations being proven should be sufficient to tell anyone that all healthcare should be nationalized with an effective system of making certain it serves the public and stays that way.
