Post 2020 Healthcare in the USA

[GGT]

Freee Market Capitalism does a crap job in the healthcare sector. Vaccine R & D is included in that mess. Even if/when a vaccine for Covid-19 makes its way to "the market"....the delivery won't be based on need, but power. Just like the N1H1 vaccine that went first to Wall Street executives, because they were considered "essential workers", above healthcare providers. SSDD.

BTW, I'm still waiting for the GOP healthcare plan that replaces the ACA (Obama Care). To date, it still sounds like trading a chicken for a check-up.

[Dreadnaught]

The incentives of the market will produce a vaccine, not the socialist ideologues of the faculty lounge. Pricing and delivery are a natural debate to have, but the underlying fact of what conditions drive the innovation remains.

[LittleFuzzy]

Right. That's why a bunch of non-profit or state entities are shoving resources into the research of a vaccine themselves. Is it going to be done by Horatio Alger who will catapult themselves from poverty into the ranks of the wealthy with the singular titanic act too, Dread?

[Being]

China will develop a vaccine before the "freeworld" does. China already having it may be what quelled Hong Kong protests.

[GGT]

The incentives of the market will produce a vaccine, not the socialist ideologues of the faculty lounge. Pricing and delivery are a natural debate to have, but the underlying fact of what conditions drive the innovation remains.

You mean the US actually cares about people, and public health policies? Citation needed.

[GGT]

More than 5 million Americans lost health insurance during the covid-19 pandemic. Early numbers thru May; full stats won't be available until mid-late 2021. (Some studies put the numbers between 10 and 27 million.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/u...nce-trump.html
https://www.familiesusa.org/resource...rican-history/
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covi...wing-job-loss/

Note that states who didn't expand Medicaid (including Texas, Florida and North Carolina) had *double* the rates of uninsured.

IMO the US will never get out of this morass until we break the chain of employer-based-health insurance, and/or decouple healthcare from the private for-profit Insurance Industry. If we *truly* care about people and their health, we should have policies to reflect that principle. If the biggest economy in the world can't do this, we're not really USA #1!