Except this hasn't been true since about 1980. Gains from economic growth have not been passed on to everyone. Health care is not available for everyone, especially. This isn't just a matter of technology.

The "cost" of production of medical technologies has very little to do with their price, in the US anyway.

To everyone, certainly not. To a lot more people? Definitely. Quality of life is better than ever before, worldwide.

We shouldn't discard a system because it's not perfect. The alternative could be much worse.

Exactly! We should use the system the majority of the developed world relies on: socialized medicine.

Ah yes, the past 40 years of wealth gains will trickle down on us any day now!

that's been the pattern for all of our industrialized history, there's no reason to be skeptical that it will suddenly stop happening

It does happen, believe it or not. I recommend "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling if you're interested.

There's a grain of truth in here, and it's true that things available to the wealthy/elite tend to become available gradually to all over time.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that things become _equal_ over time; it's rare to find wealthy people who will purchase the same kind of cutlery as the common person, to continue your analogy - for various reasons (fear of feeling inferior, ego, or just plain being oversold on it by marketing/salespeople).

The point that the article appears to be making is that healthcare advances are applying for the wealthy - but in fact _reversing_ in some cases for the poor. That's not fair or desirable.

Except the high healthcare prices are paid by the working class...

Personal attacks will get you banned here regardless of how wrong or provocative another comment is.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

Are you ashamed to live on this earth with most of Europe which waited nearly 10 years to buy into proton radiation therapy after the US adopted it? For nearly a decade there were more therapy machines in my tiny low population poor state than all of the UK.

Well most of Europe ranka much better than the US on Healthcare so no.

With a much less healthy population the US sees significant cancer and heart disease treatment successes over most of Europe. The US may pay quite a bit more for these successes, but it's not exactly black and white on which is better. There's a reason the top five cancer centers in the world are in the US.

Edit: Just realized my mistake. You are fine with trickle down healthcare in Europe, but are not fine with it in the US. There was absolutely nothing to be gained by engaging with someone so openly biased. My bad.

> the US sees significant cancer [...] treatment successes over most of Europe

Does it? What's your source please.

No, I'm saying: technology becomes cheaper and more available over time.

As for you being ashamed: cry me a river.

That's a pretty dramatic oversimplification of one of the most disgusting, inhumane disasters in modern civilization: US healthcare.

I agree that some perspective is required here, but it is pretty amazing how terrible it is.

Like, we've been to the moon, have stuff like google to search through tons of information without leaving the bathroom, and people are trying to convince me we'll soon have useful quantum computers and autonomous vehicles, but it still takes me 3 hours to book a checkup with a doctor, and the soonest they can see me is 3 months from now. Then there's the billing system, which seems to have been devised to fill the maximum number of people's rice bowls. To say nothing of what happens to the uninsured. It's nuts.

I live in a third-world country, and we have public healthcare freely available for all

How's the quality of this public healthcare? How long does it take for an appointment or surgery?

It varies by state/city. In my state, basic care is ok: ER pretty much works, same weekend appointments for general practitioners, maybe more for specialists. I don't have direct experience whith surgery, but I had family members on cancer treatment, and the public health system was better in some cases than the private one.

Where do you live, if you don’t mind me asking?

A communist country like Cuba, where life expectancy is higher, infant mortality is lower, and healthcare costs are a small fraction of the USA's?

Yes, like Cuba, that paradise where people jump into a sea with sharks in the hopes of escaping to the nightmarish US.

https://mises.org/power-market/dont-trust-cuban-health-care-...

Would you please stop taking HN threads into ideological flamewar? The comment upthread shouldn't have been so provocative, but that's no reason to take the bait and do worse.

Also, we've asked you this before, and continuing to violate the guidelines in this way eventually gets you banned here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why is my comment ideological flamewar? I have linked to a page that cites an academic article about the fake statistics from Cuba. How is that doing worse? Worse than what?

I also find it interesting that of all comments in this thread you chose mine to reply and threaten me with banning, given the absurdities that have been said above.

This speaks volumes about the moderation here. You are clearly fine with "ideological flamewar" as long as it's your ideology.

The flamey part wasn't the link, but the use of snark to make a shallow political point.

We can't read all the comments on HN, or even in any large thread, so that logic doesn't work. If you take the time to check, you'll see that we've often moderated comments that cross the line in the opposite ideological direction. Ideological rage is destructive here regardless of which charge it carries.