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Originally Posted by hcap
We have had dozens of threads about health care already. I have posted many, many links to costs vs outcomes of industrialized nations throughout the world. We do not score that well in terms of cost/effectiveness. I think my coining of the phrase "sub group of cons on this board" explains why you guys continue to ignore the evidence.  |
More on costs..
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dru...-spend-so-much
* We pay our doctors about 50% more than most comparable countries.
* We pay more than twice as much for prescription drugs, despite the fact that we use less of them than most other countries.
* Administration costs are about 7x what most countries pay.
* We perform about 50% more diagnostic procedures than other countries and we pay as much as 5x more per procedure.
Underlying all this is the largely private, profit-driven nature of American medicine, but regardless of how you feel about that, the main lesson here is how hard it would be to seriously bring these costs down. We can jabber all we want about incentives and greed and systemic waste, but the bottom line is that if we want to do anything more than nip around the edges, we'd have to pay doctors and nurses less, pay pharmaceutical companies less, pay insurance companies less (or get rid of them entirely), pay hospitals less, and pay device makers less. That's a lot of very rich and powerful interests who will fight to the death to prevent any serious cost cutting, and it's why Obama and the Democrats in Congress have largely chosen to buy them off instead.
The chart below comes from this study. Read it.
http://www.academyhealth.org/files/2...ay/Jensene.pdf
