Why is healthcare so expensive?

Elvin wrote:

Not Jamin wrote:

The mean salary of a doctor in the United States is $294,000/year according to a Medscape Report.

Physician compensation accounts for something like 8% of total healthcare expenditure. If every doctor started working for free today, we'd still have the most expensive healthcare system in the world per capita. How, then, can the fact you quote be responsible for the high cost of healthcare in the US?

There isn't one reason why healthcare is expensive. If there was it would be easy to fix. You have a slew. We overpay doctors by 20%. Our population is unhealthy. We lose an extra 10% to insurance overhead. We overpay for drugs by 1/3rd. Our liability systems adds 5%. And so on. Add them all up and we end up with a health care system that costs 2x of a lot . of other countries.

Are none of these things issues in countries where the cost of healthcare is much lower?

Prisons, hospitals, etc. should not be for profit.

Big dogs making lots of money.

Healthcare isn’t “so expensive.” You commoners are just poor.

And it should be higher.

NotPC wrote:

Because it's the one thing people will pay anything for.

Ask a billionaire dying of cancer if he'd forego all his money IF he would wake up cancer free in the morning. The market has no top end.

Judge Posner addressed this issue in talking about how to determine wrongful death compensation in tort suits. Obviously people would basically pay anything not to die when death is otherwise a certainty, to you can't just say, "how much is your life worth?" He proposed looking to how people would value risk. In other words, how much would someone have to pay you to play a game of Russian roulette with a gun that has 100 chambers? Take the answer and multiply by 100. People actually do make those choices every day, when deciding what car to buy, for instance. With insurance, this should be easy: You let healthy people buy the coverage they want, knowing that they could get a lot more money now by choosing coverage that doesn't include things like expensive end-of-life care.

I take a medication that my insurance will only pay for half of the dosage prescribed. My doctor has called the insurance co to explain, but they won’t budge. Stupid, but it is what it is. So I buy the meds odd insurance and pay the cash price instead.

Half the dosage (15 pills every 30 days) costs $2 with insurance.

Full dosage (30 pills every 30 days) costs $36 at CVS

Full dosage (30 pills every 30 days) costs $34 at Walgreens

Full dosage (30 pills every 30 days) costs $24 online

Full dosage (30 pills every 30 days) costs $6 at Jewel Osco

Full dosage (30 pills every 30 days) costs $6 at Kroger’s

Yes, folks. Meds cost much less at grocery stores than at dedicated pharmacies.

1) licensure provisions, which allow doctors to effectively limit their competition

2) masking costs to the end user (eg an mri costs $900 and $600 at 2 different facilities close to me. The $900 one is where the doctor tried to send me. It’s very difficult to discover the $900 price tag without extensive research on the patients’ part, which is totally unrewarded since insurance pays in a way that the ultimate cost is masked and doesn’t matter to the end user anyway).

There are probably others, but I suspect these 2 are the reason healthcare is one of the few industries where things get more expensive as technology gets better. Take breast implants and lasik as examples of uninsured procedures that have gotten cheaper over time as a start to proving my hypothesis.

[b]Ultra Runner Chick wrote:[/bBingo! I work in clinical research and was just going to post the same thing. The majority of people have absolutely no clue about the time and money involved in getting a drug approved, not to mention all the time and money spent on the drugs that never get approved.

Am not, but if being a Republican would have me associated with someone with your warped political ideology, well then I might as well be a Democrat.

Look it up wrote:

Elvin wrote:

In what developed country is the government the single owner of the healthcare industry?

Japan, England, France, Canada, Sweden,

Hell. Name one "developed" country other than the USA that does not have govt provided healthcare for essential services.

Add to the list: Israel, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland

MD... wrote:

Look it up wrote:

Japan, England, France, Canada, Sweden,

Hell. Name one "developed" country other than the USA that does not have govt provided healthcare for essential services.

Add to the list: Israel, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland

I don't think you understand what single payer healthcare is or how other countries' universal healthcare systems work. These are not examples of places where government is the single owner of the healthcare industry. You are listing places with universal healthcare, not places where the government is the owner of the healthcare system.

Most elements of the health care system have successfully used government to grant them monopoly powers. Doctors have controlled the training and certification process and limited the supply of new doctors. Nurses have successfully unionized in many urban areas and driven up the cost of patient care in hospitals. Local regulations (at the request of hospitals and other health care facilities) have successfully limited the number of new beds and new facilities provided in many areas. Pharmaceutical companies, with the cooperation of the FDA, have created a huge gap between drug prices within the US and drug prices outside the US. Even in the field of generic drugs the FDA has created huge regulatory obstacles to the introduction of competitive compounds (as with the infamous EpiPen and the new types of insulin that have come onto the market - actually the list of abuses of the FDA system is a horrible story of corruption and greed that has gone largely untold). "Single Payer" advocates have targeted the insurance companies, which is easy to do because they are the primary financial interface of consumers with the health care system. But as Bolshi Bernie Sanders will find out, elimination of the insurance companies will, by itself, have little impact on the cost of healthcare.

It's because of capitalism you dummies!

Licketysplit wrote:

It's because of capitalism you dummies!

The same capitalism that put a powerful computer/camera/communication device in my back pocket for under $100. Yup.

upchuck wrote:

Licketysplit wrote:

It's because of capitalism you dummies!

The same capitalism that put a powerful computer/camera/communication device in my back pocket for under $100. Yup.

Keep mindlessly consuming, bootlicker!

This is bogus. I studied with a general surgeon who did his residency at John Hopkins part of which he completed in the UK. His opinion was princess Dianna would have survived anywhere in the US due to far better emergency medicine. He told us a story of a man with a severed artery that had to be taken 4 hours by ambulance to reach a hospital that had a surgeon on call. The hospital closest to him had two surgeons that each took two nights of call. You can do the math but you hope you chose correctly when to get hurt. There is a ton of cost involved to pay xyz specialist to get up all through the night.

No one has mentioned medical school cost.

One of my professors was Canadian and would bad mouth US health care but would always brag about how much he made.

Also it is hard to compare homogeneous Norway with racially diverse US. Blacks and Hispanics have much worse health care outcomes. If you just took caucasians I would bet out health outcomes are as good or better. Also the measures are often apples to oranges. For example we count 22 week babies in mortality figures but Europe would classify it as a miscarriage.

I haven't met or heard of a person yet going to Cuba for cancer treatment but they have better outcomes per world health organization.

Lack of ownership wrote:

Business 101: someone has to have ownership.

If you ask a doctor they will pin the problem on insurance companies and the government, while still collecting their excellent pay. If you ask insurance companies they will blame the government, the drug industry, doctors and hospitals, while still making excellent profits. The drug industry blames high research costs and excessive government regulation, while spending billions on advertising. Ask the government and you’ll get every conflicting answer and solution possible, and we keep electing them, paying taxes, and just living with the problem. All those in the medical arena with the exception of patients, are doing very well. They have no reason to see anything change. There needs to be one owner (government) and and wipe out all the money wasting non-medical actions that cost so much. Every other developed country has figured this out.

OP's post was good, and this comment is excellent.

Why did you leave out the inarguable fact that taxpayers are paying for the free medical care that the two largest "minority" groups in the country enjoy. On a side note almost 90% of hispanic births in the US are subsidized by taxpayers, but it isn't considered polite to note this inconvenient truth. Oh, that's right. It's rayciss to the tell the truth.