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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

> These statistics don’t take into account things like the disproportionately high cost of healthcare in the US, so percentage of dollars spent isn’t an especially meaningful measure

Yep. The US spends more than double what countries with universal coverage spend on healthcare[1]. Those countries also have better health outcomes on nearly every metric[2] and manage to cover all of their citizens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

[2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

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Doctors in the US are also grossly overpaid compared to other countries: https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2019-international-compen...

We will need to reduce doctors salaries by atleast 50% if we want to tackle high healthcare costs..

Doctors' salaries are not responsible for skyrocketing healthcare costs in the US[1].

[1] https://i1.wp.com/investingdoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/0...

Whatever the growth in administrative work in health care may have been since 1970, administrative costs are not primarily responsible for our healthcare costs; even Elizabeth Warren's own estimates of admin cost savings in M4A peg them at under 15%.

Meanwhile: the dominant component of US health spending is in fact inpatient and outpatient procedures --- services delivered by physicians and trained health care specialists --- and those people do in fact make significantly more money in the US than they do in the UK, Europe in general, or Australia.

> Doctors' salaries are not responsible for skyrocketing healthcare costs in the US

Your chart doesn't show anything useful to the point you're trying to make. It shows a massive percentage increase in the admin side as expected, without showing the base it started from, and it does not show any percentage or specific figure break-out on related costs by each group.

You need to show each group and what is being spent on them. Ideally also show the cost increase related to physician and nurse total compensation over the last eg 10, 20, 30 years so we can see how much cost inflation there is related to that segment of US healthcare over the prime years of healthcare cost inflation.

For a supposedly free market country it's odd that the US allows the supply of doctors to be restricted. Removing restrictions on the numbers of doctors who can qualify would automatically reduce the average income while increasing the supply of doctors.

See https://www.quora.com/Who-or-what-controls-the-number-of-med... for more information.

"Doctors in the US are also grossly overpaid compared to other countries"

So are developers.

But you're on the wrong forum for people to complain about that.

Also, there aren't artificial barriers to more developers really... just an aggressive demand outstripping supply.

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