So why did you vote against it?
This is so wildly incorrect that it’s just ludicrous.
American companies produce a disproportionate share of all new drugs that come to market, and have done so for many years. We have more MRI machines per capita than any other country. We have several institutions that perform cutting-edge research. We are constantly inventing new procedures.
Guess what? All that costs money–a very great deal of it. The whole reason that other developed countries can get by with paying less for care is because America is doing a great deal of the heavy lifting.
That was 9 years ago. Try this; fill your boots:
International Comparison Reflects Flaws and Opportunities for Better U.S. Health Care:
It’s not a mystery. Other countries have health care systems that are designed to provide health care. America has a health care system that’s designed produce high profits and provide health care.
Uniquely, the US population is now dying younger. That’s impossible except true:
Life expectancy in the USA is reducing: It is the most extraordinary failure of the modern age.
There is such a vast amount of misinformation in some of these posts that all I can do is shake my head and address a few of them at random.
Let’s use Canada as an example since I know it best. The Canada Health Act mandates that everyone is entitled to all medically necessary health care, with no extra charges like co-pays. And there are no conditions – coverage can never be declined. Which is more or less the model everywhere else throughout the first world, AFAIK. How is “all the health care you need” not comprehensive?
The fact is that every advanced first-world nation has superior health care to the US by objective measures. Canada, specifically, has higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and better quality of life in old age – the latter for the obvious reasons that cost is not an impediment to the health care so essential for the elderly. Medical outcomes for cancer and the like are similar to those of the US and differ the same way they differ between states, slightly better for some types and slightly worse for others.
That’s complete bullshit. Advanced first-world nations like Germany, Switzerland, France, the UK, Canada, and Australia are not poor backwaters with “a lower standard of living” in which “everything costs less”. As for “the cost of property and maintaining it is less”, the price of an average, ordinary detached house in the city of Toronto was $1.2 million in August due to a market correction following a peak of $1.56 million in March. Yeah, they can pay doctors way less because they’re practically giving houses away! :rolleyes:
The reasons that health care costs so much in the US have been discussed here many, many times. Not one of those reasons has anything to do with actual health care or its quality.
Not at current cost levels. But those costs are driven by the crazy inefficiencies of the insurance system itself, its inability to control costs, the immense complexities of the currently broken system, and the need to cover the costs of collections and the costs of non-payments. None of those costs exist in a public UHC system.
No, the statement you are trying to refute is exactly correct and it’s your own argument that is ludicrous. First of all, lots of other countries do lots of research in medicine, medical equipment, and pharmaceuticals, but the US, with the biggest GDP, naturally does the most. This has nothing to do with health care costs. None of this money comes from the useless parasitic insurance industry or the wasteful inefficiencies of a broken health care system. Most of it comes from private companies doing for-profit R&D for global markets. The health insurance industry is basically a useless parasite on the entire health care industry since community-rated universal health care is at its core simply a highly efficient streamlined payments system with the added benefit of having a central authority to control costs.
The US has more MRI machines than anyone else because the outrageously bloated fees they can charge allows them to have a surplus of machines and staff sitting idle, needing only a relatively low utilization to still be immensely profitable. This doesn’t help anyone’s health. And as for all that much-vaunted American R&D you’re going on about, you might be interested to know that the top manufacturer of MRI machines used in the US is Siemens, a German company. Another giant in advanced high-tech medical equipment is Philips Healthcare, a Dutch company. Siemens alone is far bigger in the MRI market than GE Healthcare, and Siemens and Philips together totally dwarf it.
This is a common refrain for American politicians who want to keep the status quo. Which I find odd, because it doesn’t make any sense to want to keep a system that forces the citizens of your country to wildly overpay for goods and services in order to ensure those same goods and services are available in other countries.
Now, if this was a concept bandied about by those opposed to the status quo, it would make sense.
Who decides how much medical care costs? Does it have to cost that much? Is there something inherent in medical care that makes it so expensive?
Not so. The simple fact is that the money spent on research is about half the money spent on “Our pill will give you the health, looks, and sexual prowess of a teenager again and maybe cause your skin to turn purple and random body parts to fall off and your breath to smell like an open sewer but don’t worry because you’ll probably drop dead from it anyway” commercials.
So it is like NATO: there’s a consensus that the US is paying a disproportionate share of the mutual defense costs of Europe. So the answer is to try to make the burden be shared more equitably: and even the policy elite of Europe generally agrees with fairer burden sharing, even if it is not a popular issue among voters.
So why can’t we view medical costs the same way? If it is true, as you’re basically asserting, that the rest of the industrialized world are free riders, to some extent I’m not actually following, then it is a reasonable policy for the US to seek to more fairly share the costs with these dozens of countries, as opposed to us just plowing good money after bad into our broken system.
It seems as if every time I watch TV I see commercials about class medical class action lawsuits. Are these lawsuits a substantial expense to the healthcare industry? Most of the lawsuits are about drugs but some are about surgical mesh or defective hip joints. What I am asking is the legal costs are helping drive up the costs of American healthcare. How about in Europe?
Malpractice insurance costs are a favorite talking point of Republicans when it comes to healthcare. Therefore, I am skeptical of its actual overall influence.
Just so we’re on the same page; these are multinational conglomerates selling what they can where they can for the highest prices they can.
Would it be better if the other 29 developed countries helped the USA with how to do deals, or might it just be this is one more aspect of a 100% rigged market.
Europe and the Commonwealth countries tend to have much lower prevalence of malpractice suits, but these are not a significant contributor to health care costs either there or in the US. Studies have shown that total costs of the medical liability system are just 2.4% of national health care spending, and that’s factoring in the costs of defensive medicine – unnecessary tests and procedures for fear of lawsuits. It turns out that defensive medicine comprises the vast majority of these costs, and if the cost of defensive medicine is taken out, actual medical liability costs are just 0.43% of total health care spending. Conservatives like to argue for tort reform but that seems like a digression to deflect the argument away from the real drivers of health care costs, the parasitic insurance system and the health care cost structures it imposes.
And so you should be!
It’s interesting that elective cosmetic surgery costs have tracked consumer price increases but medical costs paid using OPM have run about twice that.
Also interesting that debated solutions to American healthcare problems often seem to start with “We can’t…”. What happened to the American “Can Do” spirit?
I am starting to think that there is a secret, hidden 0th Amendment in the Bill of Rights:
“A free market Healthcare industry, being necessary to the wealth of some citizens, the right of healthcare providers to overcharge, limit and deny services, shall not be infringed.”
Americans can’t do anything anymore. Doing Things is hard. Blaming others for our failures is easy.
I’ve never understood the complaints about malpractice costs being too high. If a doctor commits gross malpractice, his patient’s life is going to be ruined (even after the lawsuit payout). Should I be aggrieved that the doctor’s life will be ruined, too? Maybe it should be: Maybe that’ll provide an incentive for doctors to not commit malpractice to begin with.
CT scanner (I’m just picking the one technology you mentioned in your first post) was invented in the U.K.
The easiest way to see that OP is completely wrong is to note that a very large portion of Americans already get premium healthcare. The giant retailer Costco, for example, has over 200,000 employees and offers them very generous health insurance. Costco is not on the verge of bankruptcy: its sales and profits continue to grow. How does OP explain that Costco employees get excellent coverage, but Joe the Plumber is necessarily out of luck?
OP is correct of course that we need some costs to come down. I’m afraid we should stop spending fortunes to prolong the lives of terminal cancer patients by a couple of months, but is that what OP means by “comprehensive medical care”?
“In 2015, there were approximately 2.5 million people employees in the insurance sector in the United States.” Not all of these are health insurance clerks of course, but I hope OP can see how sad it is that paying people to find reasons to deny coverage is included in the “cost of medical care.” And the 2.5 million number doesn’t include the large number of clerks employed by doctors and hospitals to interact with insurance companies!
And there is much other unnecessary spending. There are rapidly diminishing returns on the latest drugs and diagnostics, but industry rent-seekers require ever-increasing profits. Prilosec™ was an expensive “miracle drug” when I took it decades ago but IIRC there was an OTC remedy that worked almost as well. Today Prilosec™ is cheap OTC but I’m sure doctors prescribe some new expensive drug that is only slightly better.
CT scan? Googling I see $1200 as the average cost in the U.S., but my CT brain scan was $29. (The top-ranked doctor who examined me wanted me to save my money but hypochondriac(?) Septimus insisted on the scan.) I didn’t get the $29 CT scan in a flea-bag clinic in Khlong Toei, BTW, but in the best hospital in North Central Thailand — you’d think you were in a 5-star hotel.
I don’t have a general solution for the increasingly sick country once called the Land of the Free™, but for many Americans a cost-savings approach would be to hop on a jet and pay for medical treatments elsewhere, at a price perhaps less than a co-payment in the U.S.