lowercase letters are artsier, also healthcare

[Rip]

I didn't write any of the following. In fact I blatantly stole it and pasted it here because.

"Here's a timeline of US healthcare in case you're wondering.

For the first half of the 20th century America was really quite medically backwards. Our supply of doctors versus our huge number of small towns and such made any physician super valuable. This rarity spawned a culture of entitlement and huge paychecks that plagues medicine today.

After WW2, the growing industrialization of the US and a high number of medically educated persons led to a boom in healthcare. Modern hospitals and independent physician practices as we know them emerged. And the economy was f*****g aces, so costs kept going up. Many modern pharma companies begin emerging in this time.

In the 1960s, a small series of economic downturns rippled through the US, signaling the decline in skilled labor's equality to paper science and information management (an equality that would be rendered permenant when the loan crisis and the gas crisis hit in the 70s, triggering an economic downturn so vast that the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a statistically insignificant hiccup in its recovery). Many Americans began defaulting on medical bills, but of course the number of persons SEEKING treatment stayed level. Most state governments pass laws mandating that hospitals must treat injured and sick patients without pre-payment.

In the late 60s/early 70s health insurance emerges. The roll of this business is not to ensure healthcare to patients (the government already did that by passing the buck to doctors and hospitals). Instead health insurance protects doctors, insuring that they are paid for their work. Insurance companies absorb debt risk, charging patients for the privilege. This is why all health insurance is so expensive: it is predicated on a model that assumes you WILL default. Businesses begin offering health insurance as a benefit, as the white-collar segment demands such benefits and workers must be wooed. To balance this, the "pension" begins to vanish, encouraging the growth of IRSs (not relevant here though).

By the 80s, the guarantee of payment has caused healthcare to boom as a career path. Colleges abusively trap med students in masses of debt, while the need for huge hospitals for modern cities gives rise to byzantine corporate power structures in healthcare. This produces two things: a growing population of skilled medical care providers without MDs to support healthcare orgs, who earn pennies on the doctors' dollars, and massive rises in capital outlay in healthcare. The money flying around the industry prompts heady waves of achievement in pharmaceuticals- as well as excess. Healthcare begins to exceed what a normal person can afford.

By the 1990s, it is fully assumed that healthcare payment is between the provider and an (insurance) payer. Insurers and providers throw around increasingly insane numbers as they battle one another; providers seeking maximum profit and insurers seeking minimum payment. Because MOST healthcare is provided by employers, and because 1990s America was riding a glut of totally imaginary financial stability brought on by lending speculation (see the 70s financial crises, above) providers and insurers both adjust their rates to amounts no individual can pay. Health insurance becomes a gatekeeping mechanism that limits the poor to minimal care and provides specific tiers of care to others.

In the 2000s a normalization of economic growth induced by the mortgage crisis destroyed the ability of many Americans and employers to support the high costs of healthcare. The government reacted by creating socialized healthcare, not socialized medicine- essentially a bandaid that conceals, but does not remedy the problem. Elaborate structures of health savings, financial aid, and special billing have emerged, all straining desperately to juggle the social essentiality of healthcare with the bananas economy that exists in the industry.

Let's predict the future.

As in the property market, healthcare is an unsustainably inflated industry held up by unwise debt practices. The time is coming when we will experience a healthcare crisis similar to the property crisis. We can expect mass defaults, with most of the damage dealt to the insurance industry. Since most insurers are also banks, the behavior of this crisis will be similar to that of the mid-2000s recession. Such a collapse is likely to normalize the inflated cost of healthcare (albeit at a small cost to quality) but as with the housing market, when the industry recovers it is likely to become even more biased in favor of the wealthy.

The grim reality is that operating healthcare in a purely capitalistic fashion has reached its practical limits. To continue to support America's healthcare needs in a remotely manageable fashion, some measure of socialized medicine is more or less required, with pay healthcare moving to a premium/specialty tier as we presently see in the UK and commonwealth nations."

[cain]

letters wut?