this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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I don't know if and am not saying there are enough to cover the gap... But there are certainly plenty of unused resources in the private hospital system. Doctors, nurses, beds, medicines that could be put to use saving lives, preventing trauma and improving the livelihoods of people in the public system.
The private medical system has siphoned too much from the public for too long. It should always have been a premium tier for the wealthy to enjoy caviar and have cable TV in a private room after surgery. Instead, people who go to a public hospital for urgent emergency care are being sent home to die in error, instead of the ICU, because public emergency rooms are catastrophically overloaded.
In Australia we've taken the disadvantage of the poor a step further, like we often do, and have propped up the private system advantaging it even further, e.g. by forcing people to pay a tax for not having private insurance, labyrinthian bureaucracy of referrals that rack up consultation fees and achieve nothing for patients, etc.
In the US, the system is overwhelmed in large part thanks to the financial side pushing for ever increasing patient loads and reduced staff. So nurses are saddled with more patients than they can safely take care of because an empty bed is lost profit. This has a cascade effect because staff are leaving the industry as a whole because of the understaffing, stress, and poor pay/life balance.
I don't know if the ACA has the same tax as your system does, but I know my state also has a tax penalty if you're not covered by insurance. The upside to this, though, is that the state offers insurance. It's not a great system (before you even get into the plague of issues with the finer points of the system), but it's better than just leaving people to fend for themselves.