> Today it's closer to $18,000.
Do you happen to know the sources of inflation? Are we consuming a lot more services? Are healthcare providers being paid more? Are healthcare companies getting rich?
Do you happen to know the sources of inflation? Are we consuming a lot more services? Are healthcare providers being paid more? Are healthcare companies getting rich?
All across healthcare, providers, scientists, administrators are faced with millions of tiny choices every day: should we spend more money to improve outcomes. Should we add that extra feature to this device - costs more but improves care a little. Should we use this more expensive material - costs more but is probably safer. Should we do additional testing - costs more but we'll be more sure it's safe. The calculus of incremental value vs. cost is subconsciously seen as inhumane across the industry -- it's seen as starting down that slippery slope that ends with a "dollars per life" number which feels wrong to everyone. Nobody wants to be the person who traded someone's health for a buck.
I'm not necessarily condemning it, I want the best possible care for my children, but I do think that (like a lot of big socioeconomic problems) this comes back to incentives.
The US spends 2-3 times what the rest of the OECD countries spend on a per-capita basis. https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
For all that spending, we have lower life expectancy and worse stats in a variety of outcomes. http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/press-releases/... http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-healthcare-comparison-20...
Not only does healthcare not have to be expensive, it isn't (comparatively speaking) in the rest of the developed world.
That's not what's going on though, is it?
All across healthcare you have groups trying to provide an evidence base, and other groups trying to decide whether that evidence base means something is value for money or not. In England that's going to be NICE, in the US it's insurance companies.
The US has a serious problem of over-testing. The reason isn't because they think it improves outomes. They know it doesn't, they know it makes things worse. They over-test because it means they're less likely to get sued. The cost of the test is lower than the cost of getting sued, even though too much testing is causing harm.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/the-chart-that-could-undo-the-us-he...
Administrator salaries don't seem to explain this: https://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ASPE1.pn...
Nor this: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/556494646da8110d29e...
This sort of thing probably doesn't help, either: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/01/30/drug-companies-flooded-...
One could argue drugs cost too much, but you can't argue they are a major reason for soaring healthcare costs.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184914/prescription-drug... says we've gone from $121B/year in 2000 to 360B/year in 2017.
As the other comment noted, there has been a vast expansion of administrative bullshit cost in the system.
Pharma drug costs have gone up a lot (that's around 10% to 15% of the $1.x trillion cost problem the US has). The US is spending about ~20% of its GDP on healthcare, or roughly twice the OECD average (~70-80% more than countries like France or Belgium). That's up from 12.x% in 1990, and 14% in 2000 (that 6% representing an added $1.x trillion in cost). That 12% figure in 1990, is comparable to what nicer developed nations spend today.
US wages are high, healthcare workers typically earn far above the median (eg US nurses and doctors are very well paid), and we've hired a lot of healthcare workers in the last 20 years. The number of healthcare workers has roughly doubled since 1990 from eight million to around 15-16 million today. A near 100% increase vs a population increase of about 30% or so over that time. That is guaranteed to generate a massive cost spike for that part of the problem, and that cost isn't being distributed across a further 100% larger population base. Healthcare workers have also seen their wage growth exceed the median wage growth, they've mostly done ok. So the net cost per capita for each healthcare worker in the US, has soared.
Insurance companies have done exactly what you'd expect. They push prices as high as they can get away with, adding more cost bloat to the system.
The American diet deteriorated dramatically since ~1980. Obesity particularly soared from around the mid 1980s to 2015. That brought with it a lot of added healthcare costs, around cancer, diabetes, and so on. These people weren't/aren't dying so much as they are requiring expensive routine care for various health consequences of the obesity. Conceptually it's like the battlefield cost of having a vast number of wounded soldiers, rather than those soldiers simply dying instead; in this case the battlefield is the economy or society generally speaking.
And then the US population has aged quite a bit in the last 20-30 years. The boomer generation is going to be extraordinarily expensive from a healthcare standpoint. For now that's getting worse by the year as with most developed nations.
When I log in to check my 401(k) status, there's a button that will tell me my projected income and expenses down the road. Today, I'm 47 and spend very, very little on healthcare. However, when I'm 87, they project I will be paying more than $10,000 per month for healthcare. How is that possible?
Look at cancer outcomes. People that live 5 years with cancer consume a lot more medical care than people that die quick.
And all sorts of other things are similar. Trauma care is better, etc.
It's clearly not the only factor but I'm pretty sure it is a factor.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...