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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30252 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Until the AMA and all the associated cartels behind licensing go afuera!, no American system is going to efficiently allocate limited resources, particularly when the least lucrative services (and time consuming to provide) tend to be preventative and routine care, for which health insurance shouldn't be used in the first place.

If you create a barrier beneath which healthcare isn't economically feasible to provide, you end up with shortages and a never-ending dumpster fire of preventable pathologies.

Of course, the momentum necessary to break the cartels up will almost certainly never occur, being that the beneficiaries are the wealthiest and most educated and the maleficiaries are the poor, unhealthy, and uneducated. But it remains true that an Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure (and ironically Franklin advocates for occupational licensing in the same letter that coined the phrase).

I don't disagree that the licensing bodies must be contributing to the issue, but I'm not sure this is fully explanatory. In every healthcare system I'm aware of, including well regarded ones in Europe and Australia, there are similar complaints about licensing bodies introducing artificial scarcity by limiting the number of doctors to keep their salaries high. It could be that this same issue is just an order of magnitude worse in the United States than elsewhere, though then I'd want to go a step further and look for the cause of that discrepancy.

Agree that preventative and routine care is necessary to avoid costs down the line, though I'll again point to places like the Netherlands to demonstrate that private health insurance is not inherently incompatible with this. Their system mandates that everyone take out private health insurance (with subsidies provided as needed), combined with government regulation of the base level of service that must be provided, which includes the general checkup / preventative type care.

It could be that this same issue is just an order of magnitude worse in the United States than elsewhere, though then I'd want to go a step further and look for the cause of that discrepancy.

The reason the US is in a worse place is actually extremely simple - the requirement that foreign doctors redo residency to practice in the US. Australia and the UK both import many doctors from overseas.

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