I'm trying to figure out how much health care we actually consume. Not just how much more we spend on it.
If our per capita health expenditures are twice many other other developed countries, but (let's say for sake of example) we also consume twice as much actual health care as those countries, then the problem is overconsumption of health care and/or worse health. And that's our problem, not government's or health insurance companies. This is what makes international comparisons really difficult. You can point to the longer life expectancy, but it's very difficult to tease apart what is health care's fault and what is just a factor of us being the fattest and most cancerous developed nation on Earth.
It turns out we buy a lot of prescription drugs. Almost no one consumes as many prescriptions as we do. And the prices of on-patent drugs are higher here than everywhere except Japan. Our generics are priced closely to elsewhere. But between our greater consumption and higher on-patent prices, we spend a total of about twice as much as most other countries for pills. We also have a much higher rate of performing coronary revascularization procedures. Our hospital visits, while relatively shorter, are probably more intensive. We have a high number of staff per acute care hospital bed (second only to UK). And our doctors are paid very high salaries, and have very high educational loans.
Concerning to me is that despite these high costs, liberals are pushing for greater access first, and thinking about the cost of care second (if at all). And why this concerns me is that, even though we visit the outpatient doctor less often than a lot of other countries, we spend almost three times the average on outpatient care. We spend twice the amount as the #2 country in outpatient care. Outpatient care is the main level of care to which uninsured people do not have access, and yet the left wants to open up these doors and let people who have no money come on in and start racking up these expenditures in addition to the hospital care they can get whenever they have an acute medical concern. Access doesn't make health care cheaper, and it doesn't reduce the overall expenditures on health care. It adds to the amount we're already spending. And we're already #2 in expenditures on preventive care, so don't tell me that visiting the doctor at the outpatient clinic for preventive checkups is going to somehow magically make all the numbers go down.
If administrative costs in private health insurance are so stupidly high, then eliminate the anti-trust exemption. Don't we still have that? Who could be surprised about a price hike in a monopoly scenario? I know Democrats introduced the bill to end this, but why didn't we start there? Why did we mandate our citizens buy a product from companies that we allow to have monopolies over it? Obama
said he supports ending the anti-trust exemption, but what he did was invite health insurance industry lobbyists to craft what should happen with all of this. So not surprisingly they're still exempt from anti-trust laws and they also have convinced Congress to force citizens to keep purchasing its product, even though it contributes to the administrative cost of health insurance that exceeds other nations by a factor of SEVEN. So obviously Obama and Congress went about that completely backwards.
Source for some of the above.
