But there's no single problem hampering US healthcare, and therefore there's no single silver bullet that will fix it. Many healthcare systems have some problems, but US health care has a lot, and many of them need to be fixed in order to improve the situation.
But if I could point to a single underlying problem that causes many of the other problems, it's that the system is primarily designed to make profit, rather than to heal people.
Exactly. In a lot of discussions someone will point out a problem and the response is “that’s not the real problem. The real problem is XYZ”. And the result is that nothing gets done. There are many problems in US healthcare that all need to be tackled independently. And most of them are around some people making a lot of money off these inefficiencies.
The US system has lots of problems, but reducing them by even 1 improves the situation. It may take fixing many to make the situation “good” by some standard, but not to merely improve it.
No matter what you do, you will make some group worse off. If you can ignore that, you can succeed. If you can’t, your change will fail.
Inefficient healthcare sounds like it's just that ambulance transit times are too long or that there's too much paperwork. It doesn't bring to mind "pharma companies getting consumers addicted to opioids later triggering a massive addiction crisis that nobody is equipped or prepared to tackle"
[1] http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/49/1/1....
There are fundamental problems with the most popular and attempted solutions. Opioid deaths ballooned when high-dosage users had the prescriptions/sources pulled abruptly, overweight Americans have been deluged by misleading and conflicting advice for decades, and every political party's proposal for healthcare is to just spend more money on it (differing on where exactly the funds will come from.) We need new ideas, not re-attempts of the old and failed ones.
The people with the highest life expectancy in the world are Asian-Americans living in NJ.
Do you have numbers for these claims? What risk taking behaviour is the entire US doing that other countries are not?
>The people with the highest life expectancy in the world are Asian-Americans living in NJ.
And does that group represent the socio-economic gamut? While you're correlating race, I wonder if it ends up being reducible to something like "upper-middle class individuals who don't smoke or drink".
That group represents about a million people but I don't have detailed enough information to claim that it is not skewed.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/two-maps-and-one-graph-com...
Our number one reason for dying is heart disease. This tracks pretty well with the obesity epidemic. Likely is one of the primary factors.
Drug epidemics, medical efficiency and others are much smaller factors.
We really need to sin tax food that hits our pleasure receptors. But mess with a persons favorite food and watch what happens. Doubt there is the will to move the needle in the right direction.
