327 - Choices, costs, and challenges in US healthcare: insurance, drug pricing, & potential reforms

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Strong rec epistasis · 2025-08 · on “Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people”

The rises in health care costs were happening long before Obamacare, and if anything Obamacare reduced the rate of rises or kept them at the same level. We have chosen this to have high access, high quality care, while also choosing to reduce health with the way we subsidize our food system and force indolent lifestyle with car-dependent urban planning. The best primer on the choices that make our healthcare expensive, and where the money goes, are in this video: [this video] Unfortunately our national discussion of health care is not centered on the reality of the discussion, and is several levels of technical depth too shallow for us to have a public discussion that could reduce costs without r

Recommends epistasis · 2025-03 · on “'Profit-Enhancing Middlemen' Fuel $200B Health-Care Chaos”

There are very very serious financial problems with going down this route. Private insurance pays for a lot of Medicare, because Medicare reimbursement rates do not cover the costs of Medicare patients in many parts of the country. One of the better sources of information I have seen on this is actually a YouTube video, something I don't normally recommend, but getting a wholistic viewpoint is somewhat difficult otherwise: [this video] We could increase the medicare contribution cap (samething like only the first $175k of income has medicare tax applied to it), but I'm not sure that's going to fill the massive gap. Perhaps increasing the rate would also work. There could be some good things about

Recommends 8f2ab37a-ed6c · 2026-03 · on “US commercial insurers pay 254% of Medicare for the same hospital procedures”

There's a super long episode on The Drive going deep into the mechanics and economics of the US healthcare system, could be a useful addition to the conversation here: [this video]

Critical makeitdouble · 2024-12 · on “Insurers rely on doctors whose judgments have been criticized by courts”

> For anyone looking for a nuanced perspective on this, I highly recommend Peter Attia's interview with Saum Sutaria (McKinsey's formed healthcare lead) The taste I got of it (introduction bit) [this video] A definition of insurance that doesn't seem to understand how randomness can be upon the group instead of the individual. A person in his situation can't be so grossly misunderstanding pooling risk over a population. I've skipped here and there among the multiple videos to get a better feeling of the whole interview, but to be blunt that perfectly fit into the stereotype of a guy coming from McKinsey.