Maybe I’m saying the most obvious thing ever, but with that last paragraph, you really make it sound like the American healthcare regimen is decided upon by the for-profit insurance companies.
Thanks for the link! That’s quite refreshing to hear. I didn’t realize the Affordable Care Act did so much more than ensuring availability of coverage and whatnot.
The ACA got a lot of headlines for a lot of BS but some of the really great things it did were very basic, under the radar items.
For example, a lot of the research that we are reading (including possibly the article we’re responding to) is the result of funding created by the ACA.
My favorite aspect of it is the massive push to digitization which means handwritten prescriptions have pretty much been eliminated removing an entire class of death and disease causing errors (from pharmacists misreading doctors’s handwriting).
While there are some regulations, it's basically a tug of war between business interests (insurance, hospitals, pharma, device manufacturers, testing companies, revolving door government agencies) that buy politicians and scam the government* and patients. No one would plan a health system this way, but planned economies (for the interests of regular people, not private equity) are "socialism" so we get to be the victims of life-or-death extortion rackets.
Anyway, our government continues to denounce as "authoritarian and oppressive" the tiny socialist island nation of Cuba that built an incredibly impressive health system that exports doctors (such as to Italy at the start of the ongoing pandemic) when they can't even get metal for syringes b/c of U.S. sanctions.
