this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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They already spend a ton of public dollars on health. The problem is that it goes to insurance companies, administrative staff, and the downstream health costs of inadequate early access to care.
You're kinda contradicting yourself.
They don't spend public dollars on health. They give it to insurance companies and administrative staff and pharmaceutical companies and other private moneyed interests, and then there's none left for us.
They actually do spend a lot of public dollars on health, it's just spent into a system that isn't efficient. Universal access to care drives down costs significantly across the board - instead they have piecemeal coverage and a system with overall costs inflated by administrative staff hired solely to manage insurance billing and delayed treatments.
It's an interesting area of policy where expanding coverage means lower costs overall.
A lot of the money they spend on "health" isn't actually spent on the labor or materials or research needed to provide healthcare, it's stolen as profit by private companies.
It's important to remember that this money isn't being spent on our healthcare. It's being handed to moneyed interests.
This is true for any health system (labour and technology costs are huge components to health care, even in systems with universal coverage). However, there are also huge and significant costs inherent to any system that doesn't provide universal coverage (e.g., people delaying care leading to more severe illness costlier to respond to). Private insurance systems also introduce significant cost pressures even for non-profit and publicly funded providers by driving up staffing costs and requiring more support staff to operate.
All this to say, the US doesn't have a budget problem when it comes to health care - the primary obstacle is the policy challenge of switching to a system that does a better job at delivering care for everyone based on need rather than ability/willingness to pay. Massive cost savings follow when people are kept healthier.
My point is the money isn't actually being spent on labor or technology - it's just going into shareholders pockets.
I assume that any military spending would be equally inefficient.