Private insurance companies have earned the public’s distrust. They routinely put profitability above their policyholders’ well-being. And a system of private health insurance provision also has higher administrative costs than a single-payer system, in which the government is the sole insurer.

But the avarice and inefficiencies of private insurers are not the sole — or even primary — reasons why vital medical services are often unaffordable and inaccessible in the United States. The bigger issue is that America’s health care providers — hospitals, physicians, and drug companies — charge much higher rates than their peers in other wealthy nations.

  • jonne@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    12 days ago

    Why would hospitals need to run clinical trials? Just provide the basic health care.

    • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      Oops, I read “generic medicine” as “genetic medicine”. I thought you were suggesting that hospitals start competing with pharma over new mRNA designs!

      Yeah, you don’t need a clinical trial to make generic medicine. But you do need special facilities, which most hospitals probably would be unwilling to pay for.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        12 days ago

        It initially said genetic because of autocorrect, I just fixed it. And hospitals wouldn’t need to be making medicine, you need to start a corporation, like those guys that are trying to make a generic insulin. If you start selling those with even a small profit margin everything else would come down. The issue is that profits get extracted by every middle man in the system.