Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

petesergeant

Private healthcare isn't the problem, lack of free healthcare is the problem. I would much rather live in the UK where private healthcare is good and reasonably priced than Canada where in most places it's simply not available.

alightsoul

It also makes them more risk averse. Kind of the other side of the coin of not being innovative

ajmurmann

Good article in general but such a misleading headline and framing. The problem, as described in the article's body, is employer-provided health insurance, not private healthcare.

irdc

Why is this news? As a European this seems totally obvious.

megaman821

This is less about private healthcare and more about how employer-provided healthcare is tax advantaged. Credits and tax breaks should go to the individual so they can choose and keep their insurance through different jobs.

cat_plus_plus

Yeah, so long as you can mooch off US healthcare innovation like COVID vaccines and weight loss drugs. There is a difference between going to doctor and getting effective treatment, as anyone who dealt with cancer in Soviet Union can testify.

dzonga

I think the article is looking at the wrong abstraction. private healthcare - e.g if there's a lot of private clinics - people paid cash, then yeah healthcare costs would go down & most of the care was preventive not treatment. competition naturally will force prices down & since individuals payers won't be able to afford massive amounts, the market will adjust it's prices vs having one large payer (gvt) i.e public healthcare or many private large payers(current insurance industry). right now - the issue isn't private healthcare - but the wrong incentives to bill insurance companies massive amounts of money. then insurance companies countering back - by having large bureaucratic processes to avoid paying those large bills. typical complex systems.

Synthetic7346

One thing that's never been clear to me is how either system plans on scaling healthcare. You have X doctors who can see (just a guess) 30X patients. Unless the number of doctors increase, some patients are going to be left out. In the current system it's those without employment. I'm other countries there's a waitlist. How can we make sure there's enough staff to provide adequate healthcare for everyone?

bell-cot

> ... my vote ... is for universal healthcare. The only real downside to it is that a bunch of companies that have entrenched their positions taking advantage of ordinary people will be denied a little profit. Make that "many, many billions of dollars of profit". Then add on the probably-millions of jobs which the staggering inefficiencies of the current system support. (Everything from lobbyists for those companies, to the minions stamping "Denied" on health insurance claims, to the opposing medical billing staff who work for doctors & hospitals & such that need to get paid, to ...) It'd be lovely if the leviathan could be slain, but don't hold your breath.

abeppu

In the US market, where union participation is also very low, it's weird to me that this is an important reason people stay in their jobs, may influence what kind of jobs you take (full time vs contracting?), but: - job offers generally do not want to get into details on the health insurance offering. it's not a main "competition" point - except when subject to some kind of union negotiated contract, the employer can change their insurance options from year to year as they try to save costs, but it's not regarded as a mass pay cut when they do - there's no standard metric on "how much do our employees pay on healthcare" (i.e. employee premium contributions, deductibles, copays), "how much time do employees spend on the phone with the insurance company", and certainly no way to feed in your last year's records of health-care to see "on plan Y you would have paid C" Though I think the private health insurance system is a dumb waste of overhead and paperwork and misaligned incentives, I do think that people would be more willing to switch jobs if they could know their plan was at least as good as the one they were leaving, both in money spent and in employee satisfaction. Opacity, in part owing to lack of commitment from employers, makes this harder.

tamimio

I don’t think it’s just healthcare, you have mortgages for inflated housing prices, expensive groceries and bills, and other expenses that make most people go to the route of boring stable job rather than innovative startup that might be out of business in a year and/or paying peanuts. Look at Canada for example, you can have a boring government job looking at excel sheets in the few hours you “actually” work in that week and still make $140k a year plus generous benefits, meanwhile you can grind your ass in a startup doing embedded firmware development and paid $70k a year with barely any benefits, hell, I have seen “senior robotic engineers” with a job descriptions enough to launch rockets and the pay is $60k! Obviously people will go with the first option, innovation won’t feed their kids.

cdrnsf

I'd love to decouple insurance form employment and I'd also love to do away with the private insurance system in the US. I've always had insurance and the experience has been as uniformly poor, regardless of provider, as it is continuous. Any positive interactions and outcomes have felt like happy accidents, not the system working. Remove the private actors, the adversarial billing, the friction with providers. It, at its best, ranges from bad to outright awful. (I'd also love to do away with tax prep — the government knows what is owed, so why make folks prepare their own count and hope it matches?)

999900000999

We could easily do this and it would actually be significantly cheaper. But I can’t imagine it happening nationwide. Maybe cities can create their own public options, say a flat 3% income tax and you get health insurance. So much progress isn’t made in the US due to the welfare queen myth. Heavily intertwined with racism, many imagine “lazy” people getting something they didn’t absolutely earn.

Grombobulous

Universal single-payer healthcare is one of the most pro-business and traditionally conservative with a lower case C thing you can imagine. It’s pretty much a no-brainer cost reduction for everyone. This doesn’t even mean you need to get rid of private insurance companies (see: Germany).

hmokiguess

Wanna see less innovation in healthcare under a single payer? Come to Canada, you will be on a queue for an MRI for at least 8 months (if you even get one).

Schlagbohrer

It also kills many, many people, so, the profit motive needs to be permanently and forever abolished from healthcare. In the US doctors look at patients with dollar signs in their eyes and simply ask, "How much money can I squeeze out of this NPC?" leading to countless abuses, from unecessary and harmful procedures being forced on non-consenting patients (like infant genital mutilation) to denial of needed healthcare because it isn't profitable enough and has an opportunity cost.

mrbluecoat

Sigh, another US Healthcare article that states the obvious and won't change our reality. This topic is such an insta-depression trigger.

nonford150

Typically, all single payer medical cost schemes are based on government facilities and intervention. Many Americans have little faith in their government to do anything, much less handle there medical care costs. This is why the employer model still exists. Americans are different - they see themselves as not Europe or Asians - and they are proud of that. The "rugged individual" is still an ideal many cling to as part of their identity.

nba456_

no it doesn't