The entire problem with healthcare is that it's a risk-reward curve. How far do you want to (or: can afford to) let people go along the curve? About 95 percent of the healthcare that people need can perfectly well be supplied by nursing assistants with a couple of years' training, or Third World providers like the ones I discussed. When you climb up into the remaining five percent, you are in the zone where real doctors and expensive equipment are needed. Keep going and you enter the zone of million-dollar drugs, teams of specialists, experimental technology, and months of intensive care. A billionaire can of course travel all the way along the curve. Should the rest of us be able to? Our system is organized around the answer "yes." This is probably untenable. Sooner or later you're going to die. Get used to it.
I grant that this ends a bit harshly. And I grant that I do not know enough to readily offer a solution to our current healthcare conundrum. However, I submit that, without many of our subsidized programs, the demand for expensive treatments would lessen, driving costs down--which would, in turn, increase the demand and restore some sort of market balance to the system. Just a thought.
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