Comment by godsinhisheaven

A lot of this is an issue of insurance no longer being "insurance" in the classical sense. Insurance covers all sorts of things, my HSA pays for all sorts of things that I never would have even considered, and while that sounds great, it helps to drive up costs. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but if you dropped all government funding of healthcare tomorrow, healthcare plans would get cheaper. It'd also be total chaos, so I get why we don't do that. But the situatuon is a lot like student loans, colleges know they can charge more because the government will lend 5-6 figures to just about anybody, so the colleges do so. And once that person is educated, you can't just "take back" the education if they don't pay. Same deal with healthcare, government subsidizes it for most of the population in lots of ways, healthcare providers know this, they increase prices to match. And you can't just take back the surgery to fix that broken arm or undeliver the baby. There's not a single silver bullet that will fix everything, but there are definitely concrete changes that can be made to improve the situation. One of them would be to make people healthier. I know, easier said than done. But by God it would make health insurance cheaper. Same way in that if everyone was a safe driver, we'd all be paying less in car insurance. Another way would be to remove that regulation or rule or something that makes it so like a hospital can't open too close to another hospital. Another would be to just, train more doctors! What I'm trying to say is, just as the problem is multi-faceted, the solution must necessarily be as well.