> as someone living in Australia where theres a public health care system that looks after everyone... costs less than half your pre-obamacare insurance

> I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system.

Agree with everything in your comment. I think I can say everyone in the US wants a solution for this, including the idea of healthcare not being financially crippling for anyone.

It is easy to wrongly reduce any issue to a single variable. Politicians love doing this because they can then identify good and bad and use that to divide the population for votes. The truth is that everything in life is a complex multivariate problem. Few take the time to take a deep dive into the tree of variables in order to understand.

While not a comprehensive explanation, I'll attempt to at least provide some perspective, particularly for those not living in the US and likely, because of that, not having direct visibility into the web of issues. From my perspective, there are four macro issues that drive our cost structures. I'll keep it short. Happy to expand on any of these if interested.

1: Education: K-12
2: Education: University
3: Student loans
4: Laws, lawyers, lawsuits, liability

Like I said, there are many variables beyond these.

Primary and Secondary Education

We send our kids to school from 5 to 17/18 years of age. After twelve years of schooling young adults come out of these institutions with no marketable skills whatsoever. Our high school graduates are only good for stacking boxes and, with training, making coffee. They are ignorant and pretty much useless without an additional 6 to 24 months of training.

They are sold the idea that minimum wage should be a living wage because we are training people who can only qualify for minimum wage jobs. Except that faulty economic ideologies is constantly eroding living standards at every level. Politicians pushed the $15/hr minimum wage as a solution for all the problems. Today, with inflation and rising cost structures (some of it driven by the doubling of the minimum wage), earning $15 per hour is likely less --in terms of purchasing power-- than it was before selling people that fantasy.

Education is at the core of a number of problems in this country. How does that affect healthcare? You are creating generations of poor people with no or low skills. This means they have trouble financially contributing to the greater good.

University Education

If I remember correctly, the university drop-out rate is such that only about 25% (if not less) of first year students in the US graduate. This is connected to the prior issue as well as other factors. Once again, we end-up with a massive number of people who will likely suffer from financial struggles for life.

The fact that K-12 schools do not prepare students well means a significant number of them have to either take (and pay for) remedial coursework or eventually drop out. Most drop out.

In addition to this, our university programs waste student time by forcing them to take irrelevant coursework. This is particularly visible in the STEM fields. Students have to engage in about a years' worth of irrelevant non-STEM coursework. I define "irrelevant" to mean: Coursework that no employer cares about at all and will have no effect in advancing anyone professionally. We could graduate people 25% faster and with 25% lower student debt if we just excised irrelevant coursework.

What's ironic about this is that anyone would agree that someone pursuing a degree in art would be wasting their time and money if forced to take a year filled with mathematics, physics, chemistry and other STEM topics. And yet, for some strange reason, we force our STEM students to spend tens of thousands of dollars and waste an entire year taking courses like "Young Karl Marx". No bullshit, my son was forced to take this course at a major university while pursuing his degree in CS. Forced? Yes. A sociology module was required for graduation. Magically, this was the only available class for something like two quarters. In other words, he would have had to delay his graduation by half a year or "choose" to take this irrelevant and utterly useless class. And pay for it, of course.

What does this have to do with healthcare?

Hang on, we are getting there.

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