Going Bankrupt from Medical Bills (Script & Sources)

Let's talk about why American healthcare is so outrageously expensive.

Did you know that medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States?

The fact is, we are the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t provide socialized healthcare. But despite what politicians who are funded by private insurance companies might tell you, American healthcare is not a free market. At least, not for you. 

You may have noticed that it’s actually impossible to find out what your healthcare will cost before you get it, which makes it impossible to comparison shop. This is also complicated by the fact that it’s impossible to do those things anyway, while you’re sick, injured, or dying.

Your healthcare cost is actually determined in a negotiation between your insurance company and your healthcare provider, both of which are for-profit organizations with no competition, transparency, or incentive to make healthcare affordable. And that’s because the foundation of privatized healthcare is that people are willing to pay literally any amount of money not to die, so providers of medical services can charge, literally any amount of money, for the simple reason that healthcare is obviously not a commodity, it’s a basic human right, and arguably one of the most fundamental. 

Now in countries that do have socialized healthcare, prices are low because the government is the only reliable buyer of medical services, and they negotiate with hospitals and pharmaceutical companies who do actually have to compete to provide the lowest cost at the highest quality.

But at least the quality of healthcare in the US is super high because of how expensive it is, right? Ha ha ha, NO! America has THE WORST healthcare outcomes among all high-income industrialized nations, we are dead last in almost every single metric.

Here’s another reason:

Doctors in the US make more money than anywhere else in the world, but it’s not because they provide the best quality or have the most expertise, it’s because medical school costs 3x as much as in other countries for the same quality education, and that’s because of the larger student debt crisis. Also, if you’re in a “high-risk” field in the US, you are guaranteed to get sued for medical malpractice, so doctors pay between 8,000 and 50,000 dollars every year for medical malpractice insurance. 

And because of that, American doctors are very afraid of being sued, which means they are very afraid of misdiagnosing their patients, so they order more and costlier testing than in most other countries, especially MRIs and CT scans, which themselves can cost 9 times as much as in other countries like Canada. 

Here’s another reason: remember how I said that the US doesn’t officially have socialized healthcare? Well actually, unofficially, it does. If you go to the emergency room and you can’t pay, that cost isn’t absorbed by the hospital, it’s factored into the pricing for people who CAN pay. So one of the reasons that a tongue depressor might cost $40, is because you’re technically being billed for 100 tongue depressors that weren’t paid for

And actually that’s a good idea if you just expand it to the entire country rather than doing it hospital by hospital, because THAT system totally screws hospitals in lower income areas where very few people can pay

And those are all pretty big reasons, but we haven’t even started talking about the total disaster and corruption merry-go-round that’s known as the pharmaceutical industry, and I PROMISE you we’ll talk about that in another video.