What do you feel is missing the most from healthcare today?

Cost transparency. Factors include: complex insurance schemes, oligopoly in healthcare providers.

I think it's high time there's a rating system for hospitals/others where you say your insurance and what your bill was and how good the service was. Hard to build but I'd use it a lot to determine where I'd like to get care. I generally avoid healthcare because the unknowns are so numerous.

New Zealander here, so I assume your question is actually whats missing from American Healthcare, not Healthcare in general.

I lived in the US for 20 years before returning back to New Zealand 3 years ago and I'm still trying to loose all the weight I gained. I see the following missing:

1. The perspective that access to Healthcare should have zero relationship to a job. Anyone should be able to access Healthcare when they need it. Full stop.

2. Cost transparency and advocacy for drug costs. If the FDA can approve drugs, then they should also be able to negotiate a fixed price for those drugs as well. Here we have Pharmac, which acts as the FDA in drug safety approval but also negotiates the max cap any company can charge. This saves the government (and the people) money in taxes (which is what we pay instead of premiums) because we can get the same medications for a fraction of what American insurance companies or individuals have to pay. And it also saves at time of service because the part we may pay for (if anything) is significantly less than any Rx copay.

3. All children should have free access to Healthcare. Again, full stop. No child should have to suffer because of an insurance system that is built for profit, not care.

4. Corn syrup. It's in everything there, it's addictive and terrible for health. It was originally set up to do something with the excess corn that farmers were growing and never stopped. And portion sizes combined with the crap that you're allowed to put into your food is shocking to the rest of us.

Heaps of people here complain about our Healthcare too, but never anyone who has lived in the US. There's no reason that the richest country on earth should have such an overwhelming distain for the health and well-being of the population. Clearly profits matter more than people.

Do better, America.

A connected network of doctors that actually spend time with patients and actually talk to one another and care for patients as a wholistic team.

Affordability

Root cause analysis: America’s diet.

We eat garbage, we get sick. Over fed, under nourished. Not many people seem to connect the dots. Unless they are trying to keep us sick, in that case, well done.

Cost transparency. Different hospitals and physicians can charge wildly different rates for the same procedure(s) with very little transparency. In no other market (open, non-black market) is this acceptable or tolerated.

Caring for health

Getting to the root cause of problems instead of pushing pills and vaccines

Courage and a good lobby to stand against the insurance industry

IMHO we have Symptom care only and no health care. The while model is based on reactive approach. With advent of AI it's shifting towards preventative and prescriptive but then it again towards symptoms. HealthCare or caring for ones health is more holistic in nature. I understand that payers can't be made solely responsible for education, employment, clean water etc but they can at least ensure that individuals can get easy access to such social determinants of health. Individuals take care of their physical body and mental well being. If by some means this can be achieved then and only then we can say we have health care until then it's just symptom care.

Let's be real and to the point here (the private/social debate is far too long to go into here), there's no monetary benefit from a providers standpoint for having a healthy society. My uncle, retired cardiologist, said it himself, "there's no money in good health". And we got the McDonald's culture to credit this, the maker of the most affordable heart attack - JO.

Care for mental health and generally, a more holistic approach.

People over profit mentality

Interoperability and focus on comprehensive prevention. It's an incredibly disjointed system.

Coordination of care. Each individual or family is forced to navigate the complex world of health care and health insurance on their own, while not understanding how to optimize the system or find the right providers at the right price. It’s absurd how this system works and even smart, educated people have a hard time dealing with it.

Lower cost of educating physicians (medical school) and raising residency wages. Also single payer healthcare and more transparency of procedure costs

Actual physicians in emergency rooms

Customer service.

Oh, gosh. How about real tools to battle insurance and PBMs, as the current ways of dealing with prior auths, peer to peers, etc. are god awful and require I believe an average of 2 additional dedicated staff per practice per an AMA survey. Knowledge-base building tools and better interfaces would be incredible. The current ones are shite, according to my research. Another thought starter: Access to affordable modern analog insulins would have massive immediate and ling term payoff. Would reduce ER utilization and complications like amputation and blindness among the 1 in 4 insulin-dependent diabetics who are rationing due to cost—1 in 4 being the pre-Covid number. Getting rid of or massively changing employer ownership of insurance purchasing—as employers are increasingly just passing costs to employees and actively targeting employees in certain classes to disincentivize them from enrolling in their plans. Transparency when shopping for health insurance, including medical and prescription benefits. A stop to closed formularies with no exception process for people with dire, urgent needs besides going nuclear with a credible press threat to Corporate Comms. Honestly, I think solutions to facilitate knowledge sharing among providers or patients and advocates to fight our failing system would be a big deal, but am not sure what the business plan would be. Realistic answers include good telehealth solutions, and boy do I wish I could have a phlebotomist come to my home or office for bloodwork, pandemic or not—just like a doctor from the app Pager did when I tried it a few years back.