Abstract
The American healthcare system has become a massive subsidy of Big Business. The USA spends at least twice what the UK and France pay for healthcare per capita, yet in terms of longevity, access, and affordability, the USA ranks last, leading only in cost. A Commonwealth study in 2014 ranked the UK healthcare system the best among the twelve nations it studied, but it also found that as the Coalition government has privatized some of the corners of the National Health Service (NHS), it has diminished its effectiveness. Using for-profit health insurers instead of relying on nonprofits and refusing single-payer systems in which the state insures the entire population is costing America about a half trillion dollars or more annually. Meanwhile, drug companies have routinely used the patent system to limit competition and to create monopolies.
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Luzkow, J.L. (2018). The Business of Healthcare. In: Monopoly Restored. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93994-0_7
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