I mean let's be honest, what bill is more ridiculous than a medical bill. I mean overpriced everything from insulin all the way up to gamma ray. The healthcare industry and healthcare workers are expected to be highly productive, and this puts a lot of stress on the people doing the work. In the United States we have a very inefficient healthcare system, and we may think it's the best country in the world and has all the greatest things, but it is far from that. Let’s use Singapore for example infant mortality rates are three times higher in the US than in Singapore. The whole idea of the medical industry being fully decentralized seems farfetched, but the US used to have a system of decentralized healthcare.
Singapore has a very good and working concept of decentralized health care. One of the most interesting pieces from the whole lecture I thought of was about Henry J Kaiser and how his shipbuilding during the Second World War changed the dynamic of how health care is now solely in insurance. This wasn't solidified until the 1952 tax cut out for companies that offered health care to their employees. Which was a very smart strategy by Mr. Kaiser to get people to work for him without raising their salaries. I think it's even more crazy that this is why our healthcare system is like what it is today. The issue today lies especially in the United States that this has gotten completely out of hand, and no one knows what they're going to pay once they walk into a hospital or healthcare facility. Like the example of when you go to a car lot, and they don't tell you how much you're going to pay obviously as a consumer you're not going to do that. That's the exact principle that our current healthcare system works on.
I really think Singapore has a great concept of how healthcare should be run by having meta save which is probably the biggest asset to the whole concept. Where you make people save for their health care and make them put away money so that they have it when they need it. It also grows tax free so you're being incentivized to save your money. The fact that the United States couldn't be able to run off reserve funds like that for more than 13 days blows my mind. That just goes to show how bad we are at saving money, but honestly, it's not that surprising. The other neat things with how Singapore run their healthcare system is the large reserve that they have in case of a big health event and it's going to be too expensive for you to pay yourself. Where the government essentially steps in and picks up the rest at no extra charge. Having a low percent deduction incentivizes people to find the best care providers and as during the lecture this has worked in the United States as well like in Indiana and Whole Foods.
I mean truly an $8000 ER visit is crazy and people are better off not using federal health care from the United States. The other issue with having a government provided insured medical practice is that those doctors surgeons and nurses are still going to get paid no matter how you are treated. They just must treat you well enough to where you won't sue them. There's no incentive for them to have the best practice. This is where privatization of the medical industry would improve quality of service and simultaneously decrease the price of overall health care and cut back spending by 36%. I would support the United States going towards private health care practices I think you could really turn things around and improve the quality of life that we have here in the US.
Healthcare is such a basic and essential need it shouldn't be so difficult to get help when you most need it or be as financially burdensome as it is. As my closing thought, I honestly hope that someday we can get it right and that we don't have to say bye to a loved one’s because we can't afford to have them around anymore. Or that we put ourselves through the financial burden of keeping them here and then for generations to come we are still paying off medical debt. Hopefully someday we can go back to what really matters and put people first instead of the all mighty dollar.
