Nothing funny about it. It's grim, but it beats dead people as the default case. We have a lower life expectancy in the US than Cuba, a nation with a GDP per capita of 8,821 USD. A country where the average person's annual wages wouldn't buy them half of a ten year old used Toyota Corolla has better health outcomes. We have people begging bystanders not to call them an ambulance when they're grievously injured, because they can't afford it.
So yeah, there are a handful of people out of thousands where this system works great. We shouldn't optimize the entire system for hundreds of millions of people for these edge cases.
You've set up a nice little fallacy for yourself in the form of declaring people you don't care about as "edge cases." I'm glad you're acknowledging that your original claim of the problem of allocating heathcare for people is not "solved" though.
Let me cut to the chase: a better system is probably one where competitive market forces are leveraged to drive down (actual) costs and drive up innovation where it is an optimal strategy, and social program-oriented solutions are deployed when that is the bad, unethical, impractical or suboptimal approach, with an overarching mechanism to regulate over time the transition from the former to the latter. If you remove the incentives that come with a free market for healthcare, it comes with benefits and costs. Stop acting as though it is cost free. It isn't.
I never took issue with your claim that healthcare in the US has problems which are solved through universal systems. I took issue with your claim that universal systems are a panacea that solve all relevant problems, and the implication that trying to hill climb to a better optimum is not worthwhile to improve outcomes.
> You've set up a nice little fallacy for yourself in the form of declaring people you don't care about as "edge cases."
I never said I don't care about anyone. This is a pretty simple trolley problem. One track has 1 million people tied up, one track has ten. I value the lives of everyone equally.
> I took issue with your claim that universal systems are a panacea that solve all relevant problems
I never said that. I said they were superior to our system, which is apparent in terms of costs and outcomes.
