Our current health care system amplifies disease

I’m currently rather sick, have strep throat, think before that I had a cold. Don’t really like it, as it has made it rather irritating, even I get sick of staying in bed every day.  But it’s given me some time to think, so I guess it isn’t all bad. I think that our system is not only designed to amplify mental illness but to amplify bodily sickness. Maybe I will write something about the mental illness idea, maybe not but for now I want to focus on bodily sickness.

The system has it stands right now seems tailor made to keep disease and various ailments spreading. Not that I think it has been deliberately made that way just that its current design lends itself to it. In a for profit health care system, you have medical insurance, but every time you get sick, the costs go up in the form of things like how much you pay for your medical costs.  This theoretically means cost savings in the form of insurance companies, but for the consumer it tends to lead to a incentive to not get sick,  or rather delay treatment until it gets bad enough when they have to seek treatment. What this means from a viewpoint of infection, and controlling the spread of disease, is that instead of the disease being treated it stays with the person for a long time, allowing for that person to infect others. Combine that with the problem of incentives against taking sick leave, and you have system that seems tailor made to amplify disease spread. This might seem rather good from the health care and pharmaceutical industry’s perspective, as it leads to more people getting sick; but it is not so good from the viewpoint of controlling for hazardous disease spread such as tuberculosis or even something worse such as Ebola, or the next bad epidemic. In the for profit system, there is the additional problem of there not being enough doses of vaccine in the case of a disease outbreak. Companies tend to find it more profitable to focus on other drugs, rather than vaccines, so when a disease outbreak does occur, it means that people get more sick and in the event of a epidemic would lead to a great many fatalities.

In addition with the many layers of private health care bureaucracy, and various rules that apply at any given time, the propagation of information through the system is greatly slowed. So it seems to one amplify disease spread, and two prevent information of that disease spread from reaching the relevant authorities such as the CDC.  So reforming the current health care system applies not just from a moral human health care system perspective, but also from the viewpoint of being able to deal with the next great epidemic as well.