Absolutely. Sadly neither side is talking about healthcare costs (the actual problem) they just want to tweak around the edges of the insurance scheme (probably because that's a significant source of 'campaign' contributions).

Get healthcare back to 5% of GDP where it belongs and you put a tremendous amount of money back in people's pockets and you eliminate most of the federal deficit.

the GDP spend is a red herring. How much innovation in healthcare and new drugs come out of anywhere but the U.S.? Less than 50%. Much of that is because other countries regulate how much a company can charge for a drug. Americans pay much more for the same drug here than you would pay elsewhere.

Someone else said it here earlier. If you want to find where things changed with healthcare costs go back to 2010. The ACA destroyed the healthcare cost structure in the US. Believe it or not, before 2010, you could be uninsured and pay out of pocket at an urgent care or ER even when things went wrong and you wouldn’t go bankrupt. The only people that the ACA did any “good” for were insurance companies. Everyone else is worse off.

That’s not to mention that no one wanted it. Obama didn’t even campaign on it. It was forced down American’s throats and then upheld with a laughable Supreme Court decision.

That's an interesting argument about innovation. However, I would point out that way too many drugs (Vioxx comes to mind) get developed and approved then turn out to cause side effects far worse than the condition they are purported to cure. Can you give me the innovation without the death? Can we cure disease instead of making maintenance drugs that cost tens of thousands per month for a lifetime?

You can still pay cash for treatment if you go to the right place.
Surgical Center of Oklahoma

I’m not saying the innovation is all good. I agree I think much of the side effects are not worth whatever gain you may get. Ever look at the side effects of semiglutides? No thank you. I would rather just eat right.

I’m someone that thinks a lot of our health problems could be solved by fixing how we look at nutrition and exercise. All the frankenfoods that have been laboratory developed since the 50s have hijacked people’s palates while simultaneously poisoning them.
Eat real food, not something from a package, get sunlight, go for walks and lift something heavy every once in awhile and you’ll be far healthier.

this. ACA made healthcare the F’d up behemoth that it is today. Insurance companies made out extremely well, Americans suffer.

ACA was originally designed to tax people yearly if they didn't have health insurance as a way of forcing people to buy health coverage, because many healthy people did not buy it.

They'd randomly get hurt, or have a medical condition, use the ER and never pay the bill and this raised everyone's rates who were paying into a plan.

I'll let you guess who repealed the ACA tax mandate to "lower taxes", yet they missed the entire point of that mandate - it was to have a large pool of healthy people paying in (and they'd probably end up using it anyway).

In addition, the ACA was originally designed to be single payer like Medicare however as a compromise (yes, we still did that not so long ago) it was legislated that private insurers get in the game.

The overall cost of medical care isn't due to the lack of insurance dollars, but because of it. Insurance has greatly exacerbated the cost of healthcare. If healthcare insurance was designed like car insurance, used in catastrophic situations like long term illnesses, overall costs would be much less. Incidentally, the ACA actually outlawed catastrophic plans because "they were pointless".

Congress needs to remove the restriction barring smaller employers to join a larger group of similar employers to help them obtain more affordable healthcare options than the ACA. ACA was designed to fail and force the government to take over the cost of healthcare for everyone (legal or not) by taxing people in the middle/upper middle class… reason they are digging in on passing a CR…

If you were in charge of the pharmaceutical companies would you want to cure a disease, or come up with a long term maintenance drug that you have a patent on? There’s no money in killing the golden goose.

permanently curing diseases is really, really hard. so while there might be some truth to the conspiracy theory you’re suggesting, there’s also a lot more to pharmaceutical and medical advancement than just that.

It was intended as sarcasm to a certain degree, but there’s also some truth to the drug companies being more concerned with their bottom line than reducing human suffering. It’s just business.