Barb
Carpe Scrotum
We have the most expensive health care system in the word because pious do-gooding little dickweeds like you want free everything for everyone, at the expense of everyone else.
No, it's because idiots like you are carrying water for the healthcare lobbyists who are ripping us off.
That may be part of it but it's certainly not all of it. Another big chunk of our health care costs is because we are the source of the bulk of the innovations in treatment in drugs and that costs money. The reason health care is cheaper in other countries is because we do all the work for them especially in the area drugs.
Complain all you like about the higher cost of care here, just realize you can't have it both ways. You can't pile on the restrictions on pharmaceutical companies and hospitals in the name of low cost to the consumer and expect them to continue to crank out the life improving, life saving treatments and drugs at they rate they have.
Profit based medicine has consequences:
If new inventions are driven primarily by the pursuit of profits, then we have a serious bias against the invention of public good or technologies that preserve or restore public goods. For example, the pharmaceutical indistry employs legions of scientists and spends billions on research and development for noncommunicable diseases afflicting the wealthy. Daly and Farley, Ecological Economics, Island Press, 2004, pg 172
It is no coincidence that only 13 of the 1240 new drugs licensed between 1975 and 1996 dealt with lethal communicable diseases that primarily afflict people from developing countries. Ibid, pg 173