alt Hacker News>But no one wants to fix it. US doctors are overpaid. US nurses are over paid. Dug companies. Admin. Lawyers. Everyone who makes the system work, and everyone who makes the system a mess are paid a fortune for it.
17% of GDP is healthcare. So between 1:10 and 2:10 people in this country are making more than they otherwise would (note I did not say wealthier) because the system is screwed up and hoovers up more of everyone else's wealth than it ought to.
Slavery was 12% and (while obviously geographic concentration of industry plays a lot into it) it took a war for them to take a haircut.
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Earnings represented by GDP are not distributed evenly across a given population. That 17% of extra earnings goes to relatively few people in the States (I'm putting this very mildly, the concentration in reality is insanely lopsided).
Possibly reasonable point about labour supply ruined by an absurd analogy with slavery.