@anongoodnurse And in the UK, all emergency treatment for anyone is free

and because our health service is not privatised, sticker prices on drugs are a fraction of those in the US. Similarly with treatments

and even ambulance pickups

@jkerian You stated tat Medicare and Medicaid were the major causes of the ridiculously inflated prices of health care today. I don't see any evidence of this in your answer.

@jkerian ":53623314 You stated tat Medicare and Medicaid were the major causes of the ridiculously inflated prices of health care today. I don't see any evidence of this in your answer." This as no corollary in real medicine. I don't know were you got this idea that doctors choose equipment based on the highest cost. I have to say it's nonsense, having had to decide on medical equipment for my office.

@jkerian Again, a non-sequitur. I ave no problem with punishing bad doctors, nor with making their medical malpractice insurers pay for a good doctor's bad choices. I used to do medical malpractice work for bot plaintiffs and defendants, because someone as to have the best interests at heart of the patient who was wronged. This is a reason for cover-your-ass costs of medicine, but not a major one. If most medicine was cover-your-ass-style, I'd say there was a real problem.

In my hospitalization, there was one instance of CYA, and that was a CT of the head when I was puking my guts out because of the morphine IV I was being given for pain. Morphine is very well known for the nausea it causes. I didn't want a CT of the ead, I knew it would be negative; I couldn't stop throwing up because of the morphine. That added $365 to my total hosp. bill of $190,900+. A drop in the bucket.

@RoryAlsop See, these are very good examples of things that are wrong with US medical care. For example, transport is unregulated. An ambulance ride can be anywhere between 1-10K. It's unregulated in most parts of te country.

"While the federal government sets reimbursement rates for patients on Medicare, it does not regulate ambulance fees for patients with private insurance. Those patients are left with a highly fragmented system in which the cost of a similar ambulance trip can vary widely from town to town."

When it comes to helicopter life flights, it's even worse. It has been calculated that the average life flight costs around $11,000. Yet they can and do charge anything they like, and 50-60K is the norm. Why? Because they can. Unregulated.

@RoryAlsop We just had a bill passed that we may be able to buy our drugs from Canada. The notion that tat is even necessary is appalling.

@anongoodnurse I know - pure capitalism at its worst :-(

It is awful.

I have to admit I have very strong opinions about all this. But I've been struggling with these issues for decades. However, if I can be shown where I'm wrong, I will admit it.

Again... you're misunderstanding me

Do you disagree that excessive testing and equipment usage is a major driving factor of high American health care costs? American hospitals, on average, simply run more tests on the same patient than (for example) UK hospitals. We're far more likely to give strep tests for common colds, for example.

@RoryAlsop There is absolutely no way you can describe American Health Care as "pure capitalism". You have to fundamentally misunderstand either health care or capitalism to think that.

It is a deeply regulated market with multiple gatekeepers, no price signalling, mostly consisting of captive customers. I'm not saying a purely free market system would be better, but the current system is roughly as far away from free market as you can get and still involve money.