Comments by "Vic 2.0" (@Vic2point0) on "Patients Before Profits | Bernie Sanders" video.

If you guys would stay the hell out of it, maybe healthcare would be affordable. Instead you want that money so you hike up the prices artificially, same as you do with the military. You also wanna lie to the American people about the real costs of healthcare in the U.S. In reality, total out of pocket costs for healthcare in 2017 was $318 billion, not the $3.5 trillion you go around claiming.
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@chadchaddingston1528 I'll have to dig it up again. But basically, it has to do with the fact that the vast majority of healthcare costs are "written off". Bernie uses the statistic of how everything's priced, not actually what the American people pay.
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False dilemma. In a free market, which the U.S. is not (particularly when it comes to the healthcare industry), profit-seeking drives prices down making care available to more people. And Bernie likes to complain about "the government being owned by the pharmaceutical industry", but why do you think they're lobbying so hard in appeal to the government in the first place? Because we've given government the power to control the industry! The same thing Bernie wants to keep doing. Under Bernie's changes, all that will really change is that pharmaceutical companies will have to find other ways (e.g., bribery that never gets exposed) to manipulate the market. On top of that, Bernie lies too much. And has misled people specifically about the real costs of healthcare in the U.S. In reality, total out of pocket costs for healthcare in 2017 was around $350 billion, not the $3.5 trillion he goes around claiming. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spending-healthcare-changed-time/#item-nhe-trends_total-national-health-expenditures-1970-and-2018
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@chadchaddingston1528 That's why I said "around". The chart doesn't give the percentage for 2017, but it shows the trajectory of percentages so we can see that OOP costs are far, far lower than we're led to believe.
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@chadchaddingston1528 Neither of those links are talking about the out-of-pocket costs, that's the point. And what you said in your second comment doesn't follow at all. The number of any sort of customer/client will always outstrip the number of people providing the labor to meet that demand. But when the free market is allowed to work, businesses (and that's what hospitals are) have every incentive to be more efficient and lower costs as much as possible. And the great thing about that is it doesn't depend on the people in charge "being good people". They will be forced to do what's right by their customers or else they go out of business as better options pop up.
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@cerebrumexcrement The "excuse" is that the free market, time and time again, drives down costs due to everyone competing for your business. What we have right now is a very heavily regulated system (closer to socialized than free market, I'd say) where the government controls who can do business, where, when and how. Can't even open a hospital without another hospital in that town using the government to stop you. And of course they keep these oppressive government agencies operating on the taxpayer dime, which is another story.
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@chadchaddingston1528 I explained it fine. But here's another link that gets specific. It turned out to be a little over 350 billion (which, again, is why I said "about"), but not much. https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/highlights.pdf Note also that the rate of growth (for OOP) was actually slower than the rate in 2016.
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