Why is affording medical care such a difficult issue?
Lets talk about the selling medical data idea. Americans spend an average of about $10,000 per year on medical care. How would you get private businesses to pay $10,000 for the privilege of having access to your medical data? Can they use your data to convince you to purchase products worth more than $10,000? Probably not. Can they use your data to prevent a big loss on you? Like, are they allowed to cancel your life insurance policy when you get terminally sick? We probably dont want that either. Maybe they can use your data to develop new medical treatments that they can sell at such a high price that they will recoup their $10,000 per person per year investment. That treatment would have to be even more expensive. Who has the money to pay for THAT? The real problem with health care in the US is that it is run as a for-profit system in an inefficient market. Some of the inefficiencies are inherent to a modern healthcare system and are difficult if not impossible to avoid (e.g. patients are often not qualified to judge which services they need; patients are usually not the ones footing the bill, so many decisions are made without regard to cost; many healthcare goods dont have a cheaper alternative - take this treatment or die, take this ambulance or bleed to death, etc.) However, many expensive inefficiencies can be avoided if all intermediate entities were willing to take a pay cut. Alas, the private market will never voluntarily cut its own profits. We could make public medical school free to attend, and then cut physician (especially specialist) payments. We could make healthcare free at the point of service, so that healthcare providers dont have to contract with billing agencies to collect patient copays. We could consolidate the health insurance industry to eliminate the administrative burden of maintaining multiple claims processes, provider networks and plans. Thats overhead both on the insurance side and on the provider side when dealing with insurance. We could negotiate payments for pharmaceuticals and medical devices nationally. If a pharmaceutical company is not willing to sell us an important drug at a reasonable price, a competing public entity could make it instead. Alas, none of these will happen in the near future because too much money is at stake. Not while politicians rely on private donations from these companies and special interest groups to finance their re-election campaigns