41–50 of 72 posts
This has nothing to do with US being expensive. It's a broken system.
Strange, this neglects that portion of health care spend that is accounted for by profits, by marketing expenses and administrative/billing bloat that ensues. It also neglects that for its massively higher spend 10% of Americans aren't covered and therefore don't receive preventative care yielding massively higher final costs, and it doesn't take into account the WHO ranks the US system as 31st in the world dramatica…
What amazes me is how few people value the value of profits in our system. The US is responsible for ~40% of the world's output in terms of medical research, which is 10x the country with the second largest amount of output, England. Profits provides the impetus for many of the medical advances invented here in the US, and many of these advances find their way to other countries. Because of profits, the US is essenti…
(Presently) Consequent is not the same thing as nessisary.
Strange, this neglects that portion of health care spend that is accounted for by profits, by marketing expenses and administrative/billing bloat that ensues. It also neglects that for its massively higher spend 10% of Americans aren't covered and therefore don't receive preventative care yielding massively higher final costs, and it doesn't take into account the WHO ranks the US system as 31st in the world dramatica…
What amazes me is how few people value the value of profits in our system. The US is responsible for ~40% of the world's output in terms of medical research, which is 10x the country with the second largest amount of output, England. Profits provides the impetus for many of the medical advances invented here in the US, and many of these advances find their way to other countries. Because of profits, the US is essenti…
The cost of a gallbladder surgery does not go around and get funnelled back into research and innovation; it is padding the pockets of coders (an almost unheard of profession in much of the rest of the world), administrators and doctors who are busy paying off student debts the size of most doctors in the western world's mortgages.
Drug costs are completely out of control and the bankrupting effect this has on the most vulnerable members of a community is completely outrageous and out of touch with what a reasonable society should be expected to do. The high price of monoclonal antibodies and other treatments is no excuse for the blatant market failure that occurs here.
To further expand on this: Healthcare is a price inelastic good. The current situation in the US is one of abject market failure as what should be considered an essential service is made available to only those able to pay for it (or willing to bankrupt their families). The worst instances of this are in cases of cancer, where life-extending therapies (maybe only a few months, maybe many years, and a tiny pay-off of a long future) are only available for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. So vulnerable families pay it - middle class families that thought they were doing everything right, sell or re-mortgage the family house in the hope of keeping their loved one around forever. Then they die. Then the hardship begins. This is, in my considered opinion, criminal.
Bottom line: I firmly believe there is no excuse for the wastage and high costs that the American system provides. Healthcare should be about innovation; and yes we need to fund it. But in the US as in other countries, significant funding is provided by governments for basic research which goes on to be capitalised by private companies, when this information should be free. Bottom line- this article, and indeed your comment, is a post hoc rationalisation of high healthcare charges, with little recognition of the true drivers, and it does not need to be this way
Slightly off topic but is there is a such thing as universal affordable good healthcare? I've talked to a few U.S. citizens that worked abroad who said healthcare in European countries is universally available but the demand outstrips the supply causing longer wait times to get treated than in the U.S. and that they prefer the U.S. system. These are of course people who have good jobs in the U.S. with company provide…
For example, here in Italy I can look for: public sector, private public-affiliated sector and full private sector.
When I needed a full low abdomen echography I first contacted the public sector, they told me they had a wait list of 2.5months for that common exam, but I could call a private public-affiliated clinic and do it there (they also gave me suggestions on which clinics were available). Cost ~23euros (not all the exams have this waiting time, when I needed just physiotherapy or to see a psychologist I had Called three private public-affiliated clinics. These are clinics where all the staff is private and is managed like a normal company, but if they do an exam and you have the paper from your GP they can fill a form and get a part payed from the public sector (in a sort of exchange for helping reducing the wait time) In all of three they could visit me in 2-4 days, paying just ~30e.
Lastly there was the full private clinic, those are not subsidized in any way but they have a very short list and if you want you can make a private insurance that cover basically whatever exams you will ever need from them. They could visit me in the next 2 hours for just ~80e.
Note I was not in a emergency, if that was the case I could just run to the hospital and they would visit me instantly without making me pay anything (you can also run to the hospital without an ongoing emergency... they usually don't make you pay nothing anyway and do the exams but make you wait hours until they have no more urgent cases). Note also that if you have a serious condition (cancer like or anything with high risk of fatality) you will get ahead of any list and be visited asap, no money asked.
And Italy is considered one of those "long list countries" in EUW.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have something more relevant, which is that the US spends far more on healthcare than anywhere else, but is in the 10 OECD countries with the lowest life expectancy. http://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-does-uk-healthcare-spending-com... > While the USA outspent the UK on healthcare (£6,311 and £2,777 per person2 respectively) in 2014, average life expectancy at birth in the USA was 78.8, compared with 81.4 in the UK. > D…
We are all aware that the US spends a lot on healthcare. The article we are discussing provides a good explanation of why. The fact that health care and health outcomes are minimally correlated is well known; see RAND, Oregon, and lots of non-RCT studies that generally fail to find much correlation (e.g. this one, which made the rounds recently https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/25135... ). I'm no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are all aware that the US spends a lot on healthcare. The article we are discussing provides a good explanation of why. The fact that health care and health outcomes are minimally correlated is well known; see RAND, Oregon, and lots of non-RCT studies that generally fail to find much correlation (e.g. this one, which made the rounds recently https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/25135... ). I'm no…
AFAICT, the article explains it only in the statistical sense of the word, not the plain-English sense, so I think you're missing the point of the comment.
This strikes me as circular logic. "The reason healthcare is expensive is because the US is expensive." I have no problem with the idea of healthcare expenditures increasing proportionally to GDP because it's a luxury good. This is logical. I'll pay more to protect my life than widgets. But I don't see the connection between this and the thesis: >Now, to be clear, my position is not that we ought to be spending as mu…
That's not circular. It's merely pointing to an underlying cause that is probably not specific to the health care system.
Slightly off topic but is there is a such thing as universal affordable good healthcare? I've talked to a few U.S. citizens that worked abroad who said healthcare in European countries is universally available but the demand outstrips the supply causing longer wait times to get treated than in the U.S. and that they prefer the U.S. system. These are of course people who have good jobs in the U.S. with company provide…
The Australian system is far from perfect but does come some way to solving this. It is effectively 2 tiered: 1) Public Medicare, the publicly funded system available to everybody. 2) Private insurance, paid for by the individual and tailored to their needs. To pay for the public system everybody pays a Medicare levy as part of their income tax. The levy is coarsely means tested. If you have private insurance then th…
From anecdotal conversations I know there are many people who purchase a new pair of glasses every year just because the system is basically set up to encourage this which smells like very wasteful consumption to me. I don't need a pair of glasses every year. I have gone through 3 sets of glasses in 15 years.
If I wanted to I could opt to exclude optical from my cover and save some money every month but then I'd worry about what happens if I lose my glasses or sit on them and I'd end up out of pocket so I keep paying for optical cover I don't use and feel like a sucker every year for not taking advantage of subsidized glasses.
Same thing with trips to dentist I know people who insist on general dental (unnecessary cleaning etc) because they are subsidized so they "need to take advantage to get their money's worth".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What amazes me is how few people value the value of profits in our system. The US is responsible for ~40% of the world's output in terms of medical research, which is 10x the country with the second largest amount of output, England. Profits provides the impetus for many of the medical advances invented here in the US, and many of these advances find their way to other countries. Because of profits, the US is essenti…
Points like this sound a lot better when its not you that are lacking access to medical care. (Presently) Consequent is not the same thing as nessisary.
The specialist I currently see is considered the best doctor in the world for my illness because he's the foremost researcher in the world studying it. He's French. He's in the US because the system here provides him with the resources to study it and come up with better treatments.
Slightly off topic but is there is a such thing as universal affordable good healthcare? I've talked to a few U.S. citizens that worked abroad who said healthcare in European countries is universally available but the demand outstrips the supply causing longer wait times to get treated than in the U.S. and that they prefer the U.S. system. These are of course people who have good jobs in the U.S. with company provide…
(Personally I feel "real" / objective health is more important than the subjective "customer satisfaction" aspect of health care, but yea, I guess that's politics.)
1. E.g. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Sweden/Unit...