Socialized healthcare is also failing all around the world. Have you seen the situation in the UK recently? Or Canada?
The cause of the malaise seems to be the same everywhere. See the biggest shift in the US healthcare system over the last 50 years for example:
There was a 3,200 percent increase in the number of healthcare administrators between 1975 and 2010, compared to a 150% increase in physicians, due to an increasing number of regulations:
>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009.) [3]
In contrast, the fields of medicine in the US less affected by this surge in government intervention; cosmetic and laser eye surgery, have seen prices increase at below the rate of inflation. [4]
A significant fraction of healthcare administrators are there to deal with insurers, both to negotiate pre-approval and then to get paid afterward.
That's what happens when you have thousands of insurance companies, each negotiating their own individual prices for everything. On top of that, you have to deal with insurers that will deny pre-approvals for medically necessary treatments on first request as a matter of course, then deny the first claim afterwards despite acquiescing to the pre-approval. And finally, patients may have primary, secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary insurers to ensure they're fully covered, so you have to figure out which fraction of the procedure each will pay.
Rather than doctors spending their entire days haggling with insurers, they've hired administrators to offload the work so they can get back to being doctors. Unfortunately, the byzantine structure which is privatized health insurance has only continued to grow in size and complexity, necessitating a growing number of administrators to handle the interface between the two.
A point, part of the reason insurance companies deny claims isn't because they think they can get out of paying. It's because doctors don't get paid for dealing with insurance. So they tie doctors up so doctors can't see more patients and generate billing.
The current share of healthcare spending that occurs through government and private insurers is due to government intervention. Out of pocket spending constituted the vast majority of spending in the 1950s before these government interventions were enacted.
In contrast, cosmetic and laser eye surgery have mostly escaped the effects of these interventions, and are consequently the only fields of medicine where 1. most spending is out of pocket, and 2. prices have increased at below the rate of inflation.
As for the socialized health care panacea, if you look at the health care systems of other countries where they have fully socialized expenses, you see huge problems, not exactly the same as the U.S.'s, but absolute disasters nonetheless. Health care as a centralized institution doesn't work.
The cause of the malaise seems to be the same everywhere. See the biggest shift in the US healthcare system over the last 50 years for example:
There was a 3,200 percent increase in the number of healthcare administrators between 1975 and 2010, compared to a 150% increase in physicians, due to an increasing number of regulations:
https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...
>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009.) [3]
In contrast, the fields of medicine in the US less affected by this surge in government intervention; cosmetic and laser eye surgery, have seen prices increase at below the rate of inflation. [4]
[1] https://www.cms.gov/medicare/payment/prospective-payment-sys...
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
[3] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/h...
[4] https://healthblog.ncpathinktank.org/why-cant-the-m