Everything that people can get insurance for becomes more expensive. Dental and veterinary bills, for example, used to be affordable. People made responsible decisions about the level of care to choose, when they were paying for it. It seems that in the two fields I mentioned, a critical mass of insured has been achieved and it's getting unaffordable.
I remember when they sold mandatory car insurance in CT. The argument was that when everyone was in the pool it would drive the cost down. It never occurred to the dupes that voted for it that you were taking a good that has limited supply (More so because they were limiting the insurers to CT companies) and pushing the demand to maximum.
Soon a policy that used to cost 180 bucks a year cost 800 bucks and a fender that you could get for 75 bucks cost 450.
“Modern medicine is inherently unaffordable.”
Actually the prices are jacked up to make it profitable for the drug companies, big hospital systems and insurers to make money and to pay for those people that don’t pay at all. I was told by one person who worked in admissions of a big city hospital system that it seemed to her like 70-90 percent did not pay. Big hospital systems tell doctors they must order scans for as much as they can and the hospital makes lots of money this way. This is not a market system. There is no competition if your “network” is one of these systems. The physician groups are owned by these hospitals, setting higher prices than the doctors would have charged if on their own. The whole thing needs to be freed up and taken out of government control and interference.
>>>Modern medicine is inherently unaffordable.<<<
People expect, or think they deserve, ultra expensive treatment. I met a guy who had some sort of stint put into his intestines for some heredity disease that runs in his family. 150k for that. He is on medicare. He sees nothing wrong in that price tag, because he didn’t pay it.
I have heard about a therapy for correcting arterial blockage called chelation. It claims to dissolve arterial plaque so it is excreted. When I asked my cardiologist about it, he said it was unproven, not having been studied. Why would the drug companies who get to sell you statins for the rest of your life bother to study a therapy that might make their product unnecessary?