So by all accounts it should be cheaper for for-profit insurance companies too, unless they have ways to externalize the costs onto the rest of society. Which I guess is more circumstantial evidence for how messed up the system must be.
UNH stock has been tanked all year, until the govt announced that they would raise Medicare advantage reimbursement rates. The insurance companies have an incentive to pursue volume instead of cutting costs for programs that the government is subsidizing. For everyone else, they just raise the prices which is a much more complicated issue.
Hard agree, same with fevers. Heat helps kill many diseases, dont blunt your body's defenses.
There are exceptions to both rules, but many people forget which part is the exception and which part is the rule.
Long-winding tangential anecdote (which is why I'm replying to myself in a separate comment), but I have pretty extreme example of this: I managed to avoid nearly all suffering after getting a tonsillectomy in my mid-thirties, while using almost no painkillers.
My ENT surgeons warned that me "I'd hate him for about a month, then I'd love him for never having to deal with [serious medical condition that justified the removal of tonsils] again". He prescribed all kinds of stuff to alleviate the expected suffering, and advised me to try to take the weakest options I was comfortable with, because the heavier ones might have some unpleasant side effects. It's the only time in my life I've been prescribed painkillers at all, actually (this was in Sweden, btw).
I got codeine/paracetamol as a coughing suppressor and mild painkiller, a couple of heavier painkillers for if it got worse (I forgot the name but some kind of heavy-duty variation of diclophenac that you can only get with a prescription), and some kind of nasty solution to gargle with that supposedly would numb my throat if it got really bad. I've been told this is nothing compared to what you can expect in the US.
Then in the evening after the surgery, when I was trying to eat a soup with my mom, I realized soup didn't hurt as much as drinking plain tap water. And then I thought: isn't it odd that drinking plain water feels like a thousand paper-cuts in the open wound in my throat, but whenever the coughing made the wounds open and bleed, the blood doesn't hurt at all? Blood is mostly water, so what is the difference? Could it be the salt? Is this similar to why drinking demineralized water is bad for you? What's the opposite of demineralized water? Oral rehydration solution. Ok, trivial to make, let's try that. I'll drink it luke-warm to be close to body temperature too.
Turns out that that works. Oral rehydration solution is almost painless to drink after a tonsillectomy. I know this is anecdata, but sample size three: I've since shared this information with two friends who got a tonsillectomy, and they've been extremely grateful for this tip.
It even seemed to speed up my recovery, probably due to a lack of irritation triggering inflammation. I was eating solid food within days. DAYS. My mom, a retired family physician herself, couldn't believe her eyes.
I ended up only needing the codeine/paracemtal in the evening to suppress coughing in my sleep, and brought back all the other pain-killers without opening them.
Pain is also suffering, and there is no virtue in suffering needlessly.
Even more importantly, there's also chronic pain, which can severely affect quality of file permanently and is essentially an illness all of its own. Research supports the concept of "pain memory", where chronic pain develops as the result of leaving the pain from a temporary condition untreated.
The discussion started in the context of taking painkillers regularly for head-aches without pausing to investigate what causes those headaches. That is not the same thing someone developing chronic pain in one's leg after a it breaks in a particularly nasty way and going through a really painful recovery process, for example.
Nobody is saying that people who suffer from chronic pain shouldn't have a relief from their suffering. But as another comment pointed out: the US seems to have a big issue with untreated conditions in general than other countries. Not in the sense of not treating the pain, but in the sense of not treating the conditions leading to pain. Tackle that and there will be fewer chronic pain sufferers to begin with.
water?
EDIT: I see it's a thing. Salt, water and sugar.
The body does not absorb water passively but actively, and it's been known for a very long time that water with a bit of salt and sugar is absorbed faster. This has been crucial in reducing (especially child) mortality due to acute fluid loss from diarrhea due to, say, cholera[0]. (I personally find amazing that Robert K. Crane figured out the mechanism behind it in the sixties already[1])
Now, "proper" ORS, according to the WHO, is the following:
Sodium chloride 2.6 gr/l
Glucose, anhydrous 13.5 gr/l
Potassium chloride 1.5 gr/l
Trisodium citrate, dihydrate 2.9 gr/l
glucose facilitates the absorption of sodium (and hence water) on a 1:1 molar basis in the small intestine; sodium and potassium are needed to replace the body losses of these essential ions during diarrhoea (and vomiting); citrate corrects the acidosis that occurs as a result of diarrhoea and dehydration.
So you can usually get away with not having the potassium and trisodium if the reason for dehydration is neither diarrhoea or vomiting.
This translates to a simple home recipe of:
1 liter (or 4.25 cups) of water
1/2 a teaspoon of salt (3 gr)
2 table spoons of sugar (30 gr) OR 1 table spoon of glucose (15 gr)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_rehydration_therapy
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-glucose_transport_prote...
[2] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-FCH-CAH-06.1 page 12 of the linked on that page (labeled as page 3)
Americans' relationship with painkillers is absolutely unhinged.
Additionally, in EU you can just take a sick day to rest and recover pretty much any time you need it. In the US you have limited “sick days”. E.g I now only have 6 “sick days” per year.. (and I’m fortunate to work in tech, I just WFH when I’m under the weather. But people who are less well off need to suck it up and go to work).
In many countries if a doctor believes you're too sick to work you have a right to take leave until you recover, without risking your job and without expending limited "sick days". In those circumstances the doctor will of course prescribe something for your pain, but as a patient you have no incentive to insist the painkiller is strong enough to allow you to continue working.
This is vastly overstating the rationality of the human body. It's no more rational than the human mind, which is often quite irrational. Your body isn't the product of medical school, nor intelligent design, but rather random natural selection, which is decent but demonstrably far from perfect.
Occasionally I have a headache. Not frequently, and I don't necessarily know why. These things just happen. I take a painkiller, and problem solved. I've been seen by doctors over the years for physicals or other reasons, and there's no indication of any underlying medical condition. An occasional headache is not an indicator of something more serious, and the painkiller is not "masking" a larger problem.
The same goes for random muscle aches. They're infrequent, but they can happen, for whatever reason, and there's no reason to panic or to suffer when you can just make them go away.
I don't think I'm unusual here. As far as I've heard, random, infrequent headaches or other aches are extremely common.
Moreover, there are pains that we know the cause: for example, I experience a bump or a cut. My body continues to annoy me with pain unnecessarily. Yes, I'm healing, I'm well aware of that. I just need my body to STFU with the pain and stop reminding me of it.