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Comment by chrismeller | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone ever disputed this? Isn’t what we should be trying to prove whether or not that increased spending is actually providing innovation in drugs and procedures and thereby enabling other countries to put varying degrees of price controls in place without severely limiting the quality of care?

Framed in the opposite direction: could the US put in any form of price control to equalize this metric without significant impact to the continued investment in the field?

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If the US managed to save money on healthcare, that extra money should go to universities so that the results of the research are not proprietary to pharma companies, but instead can be used by anyone.

That's not how it works. Commercialization of drugs from University research is what already feeds a multi billion dollar industry.

That's how it could work.

How exactly do you see a system working that way? We establish a single payer plan and just start taxing everyone based on the current estimated healthcare expenditures and blindly shove money at universities?

You shove money at universities and don't patent the drugs they come up with so that companies can compete on the price of manufacturing them.

Then why restrict it to public universities? Give private universities and pharmaceutical companies funding as well, with the stipulation that research resulting from that funding be public domain. Public universities are not special entities in this (which is the GP's point).

While financing innovation could explain the higher costs, it does not explain why the US performs bad in almost any health-related metric.

Of course not. That’s not related to money, that’s because we all eat anything we want and haven’t walked further than the car since we were 15... if anything it’s amazing that we’re as healthy as we are.

Wonder what this chart would like if you plot quality of care/life. It would also be interesting to see how health spending in the US (particularly drug spend) influence health related metrics in RoW.

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