Private For Non-Profit Health Care - Possible?

[Elheru Aran]

Simon, you might want to edit your post if possible, you seem to have mixed up a few tags...

[Esquire]

Basically Broomstick and Simon are right, as they usually are, but I want to expand on something. A lot of the reason health care pricing looks so insane is that people generally look at a bill as a finite number of individual costs, when they're actually a great many systems costs condensed into the form you see on your bill because that's the only place money actually enters the health care system. The infamous $20 hospital ibuprofen isn't just for the pill itself, it's for (some fraction of) the transportation and storage of the pill; for the pharmacy staff; for the custodians and security staff who kept the pill clean and safe; for the air conditioning that kept the storage the proper temperature; for the nurse who brought it to you; for the administrators who kept the lights on; and a whole lot of other things. All of those personnel and maintenance costs were paid by the hospital itself... but that's just different arms of the system paying each other, it doesn't bring any money into it in the first place.

[Broomstick]

Here an example where a very, very high-priced drug is expensive not so much from price-gouging but because it's bespoke genetic engineering, where the cure has to be custom-manufactured to the specifications of each patient:

Kymirah

Yes, I'm sure there is some mark up here, but honestly, this sort of drug will never be as cheap as, say, aspirin.

It puts a certain type of leukemia into remission about 80% of the time with just one dose (that's the good news - you only need one dose, not ongoing doses). Novartis says it's not planning to charge patients that don't respond to the treatment (hmmm.... so how is it paid for again...?) It can also have life-threatening complications. So what else is new in cancer therapy, right?

[Adam Reynolds]

Basically Broomstick and Simon are right, as they usually are, but I want to expand on something. A lot of the reason health care pricing looks so insane is that people generally look at a bill as a finite number of individual costs, when they're actually a great many systems costs condensed into the form you see on your bill because that's the only place money actually enters the health care system. The infamous $20 hospital ibuprofen isn't just for the pill itself, it's for (some fraction of) the transportation and storage of the pill; for the pharmacy staff; for the custodians and security staff who kept the pill clean and safe; for the air conditioning that kept the storage the proper temperature; for the nurse who brought it to you; for the administrators who kept the lights on; and a whole lot of other things. All of those personnel and maintenance costs were paid by the hospital itself... but that's just different arms of the system paying each other, it doesn't bring any money into it in the first place.

For that matter it is no different than eating at a restaurant, albeit the underlying costs are so much higher.