Comment by brohoolio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brohoolio | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare costs create huge problems across the economy, increasing the cost of everything from manufacturing to higher education.

Between myself and my employer, it costs about $20,000 to insure my family a year. My employer shares much of the cost breakdown and it's interesting how goes to prescriptions and how much of that goes to specialty drugs to keep a handful of people alive.

$500 million dollar spend on healthcare.

$120 million goes to prescriptions.

$40 million of that went to specialty drugs, representing 1.7% of the prescriptions.

"The average ingredient cost of a single-source brand prescription increased by 14.9% in 2016 to an average $745 per prescription, mainly driven by high-cost specialty drugs. The average ingredient cost of multiple-source brand prescription increased by 49.5% to an average $585 per prescription. The average ingredient cost for a generic prescription decreased by 10.9% to an average cost of $34.04 per prescription. "

Drug prices are high in the US but drug spending overall is nothing compared to overall healthcare costs. With a handful of exceptions, even the most expensive drugs cost 10k a year.

In contrast a few weeks in the ICU can easily top 100k. A visit to the ER is usually 1500 just to walk in the door. Healthcare costs are largely a result too many middle men and overhead from extremely high healthcare provider salary.

> overhead from extremely high healthcare provider salary.

may be there isn't any competition (which could be because it's quite hard to establish a new healthcare clinic/hospital)? Also, are there limited supplies of health care professionals that cause their salaries to grow to such a high number?

> Between myself and my employer, it costs about $20,000 to insure my family a year.

Wow, that's an awful lot. What's the level of service like? For comparison when I lived in Switzerland my family, ie my wife and 2 kids, were about 750 CHF a month. All paid from my pocket.

The level of care was stunning though. That 750 was for single room care, and we had two babies by caesarean. Also the times I was in the emergency room there were zero other people in line. Almost wondered whether it was actually an emergency room.

You can get less comfy care, I think at about 500 per month, sharing a bedroom with one other patient.

By contrast the NHS in the UK is pretty stretched when you go there, but paid via taxes.

How was the deductible? But yes, Switzerland is basically the US system done right.

Though with the cost of education and all the mess around malpractice, it seems very hard to _fix_ the US system.

You know, I don't recall there being a deductible. Maybe there was, but most of the 7K or so expenses from the C-sections were paid by the insurance. Perhaps it was a few hundred, which I tended to hit regardless due to having various minor creme/inhaler/doctor appointment needs.

The system was that you'd pay for little things yourself, like asthma inhalers, and then send in a form to your insurer. So the deductible would have come out of the summary you got each month.

'Healthcare costs create huge problems'

Yes, right, problem is abnormal cost of healthcare in US, that should be fixed first. But when only thing you do about this is letting wild free market put price tags as they want and let poor people be hopeless under costs, that is 'unhealthy' for the society.

Health care costs in the US did not start rising faster than the rest of the economy until the government got heavily involved in it in the 1960s.

The free market is not the problem.

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