On this episode Erik is joined by Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay), a returning guest who was previously here to talk about Bitcoin and crypto from an Austrian perspective. Today he’s here to talk about healthcare from the Austrian perspective. He breaks down the causes for the dysfunction in the US healthcare system as he sees them and talks about what (if anything) might fix them.

They discuss the factors that are distorting incentives in healthcare and why they result from a lack of free markets. Vijay talks about employer-sponsored healthcare that emerged during World War Two, which has remained the default system “by accident” ever since. He also talks about Medicare and farm subsidies and how those have contributed to consumers paying more but getting less when it comes to healthcare.

Erik asks what Vijay would do if he could wave a wand and change anything about the US healthcare system, but Vijay says that it might take a collapse of the system to change how things work. Vijay talks about why the US system is still superior to single-payer healthcare systems around the world and why he would look to Singapore as an example of a country that the US could learn from. They also discuss the Austrian and libertarian perspectives on governance and monetary policy more broadly.

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Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.


Quotable Lines From This Episode:

“The cost in single-payer healthcare systems is the wait. I’d rather live somewhere where the treatment is available even if it is expensive.”

“Ask a doctor delivering a baby, ‘how much does this cost?’ They can’t tell you because they don’t know. This is the only industry where a provider has no idea what their service costs.”

“Insurance is supposed to be for unexpected catastrophic events, so it’s strange that we use it for all these routine healthcare procedures.”