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10/ Ie, the health conditions that get prioritized are efficiently privatizable ones. Healthcare evolves by corporations deciding for instance that "diabetes" is a better market, and more worth privatizing, than some other condition which offers weaker margins.
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11/ Goes without saying that the efficiently privatizable conditions may not be the ones that represent the greatest societal burden. Social and moral of course, but in the US, we mean primarily economic burden.
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12/ Condition A that represents say a -1% drag on the GDP (ie fixing it would add 1% to growth) goes unaddressed because there is no way to privately make a sweet profit off it.
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13/ While Condition B, that is a 10th place rounding error in GDP terms gets a huge amount of attention/resources because it has efficient private market development potential. Call these "charismatic diseases."
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14/ A charismatic disease/condition is 3 things: a) Easy to market (strong "brands" in symptom terms) b) Easy to dramatize via relateable life narratives ("the American dream, but with diabetes") c) Most importantly: good for drive-by interventions instead of open-ended care
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15/ Charismatic diseases are (Carsean) finite-game diseases where there is such a thing as a clear win condition (or escalation sequence thereof) marketable as a "cure narrative." This does not mean the condition is necessarily curable, just that there's an tree of things to try
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16/ By contrast, infinite game diseases/conditions that require open-ended care relationships are a systemic blindspot. They are hard to privatize, and a system that only targets what is privatizable tends to just give up and let sufferers just live awful lives till they die
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17/ Again, just an observation. Draw your own conclusions about whether tradeoffs made by other countries are better or worse. The point is, "the US has the best healthcare" is a very narrow claim: "best healthcare that a system based on privatizing diseases can deliver"
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18/ Equally, resist the temptation to write off advances made by other countries simply because they aren't accompanied by the innovation theater of the US: patents, big fortunes, miraculous-seeming outcomes for a few.
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19/ Non-private innovations LOOK different: large-scale assembly line cataract operations at "eye camps" in India for example. Or of course, immunization/vaccination.
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Replying to
21/ tldr of the thread: Don't buy into naive arguments that the US healthcare system is "best in the world" and if your experience of it sucks, it's only because because "other countries free-ride" and you didn't buy enough Big Pharma shares.
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22/ Addendum to point 12: In some cases a net negative societal health condition may be "negatively privatizable" where some other sector (sugar, tobacco) has a stronger incentive to keep the condition alive than the healthcare sector does to cure it for profit.
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