Why are the prices so insane? Where do the money go? I'm from Eastern Europe so of course the prices would be different, but by an order of a magnitude at the minimum seems strange.
There is no incentive for doctors to be efficient so they aren't. They order too many supplies, do too many procedures quickly (when doing them slowly would be fine, and cheaper, etc).
Price discipline is like gravity. It affects everything. In most American businesses subject to market forces, there is an enormous push to optimize every single little bit of the business to control costs.
This force simply doesn't exist in healthcare.
- medical malpractice insurance -> legal system
- big pharma/med devices industry
- doctors are paid higher in the US than in another countries
- billing staff overhead because of the insane insurance system
- highly paid hospital administration
- lots of middlemen that stay invisible because there is no price transparency
- shiny new buildings that are built by friends of the hospital administration
Doesn't mean it will be easy to find, but you might be able to find it that way.
But this is not information the hospital would share w/ you w/ great enthusiasm, obviously.
Big pharma has actually reduced the hospitalization costs over the past two decades.
Edit: can someone explain downvotes?. How is big pharma increasing hospital costs?
please take a look at this, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2669633/
"The major empirical finding from this research is that medication use by Medicare beneficiaries is significantly negatively associated with hospital spending. Moreover, the cross-effect is quite large: each additional prescription drug fill reduces hospital costs by slightly more than $100 or about 5 percent measured at the mean level of Medicare payments in 2000 for inpatient hospital services for study subjects. "
- Gold plating everything to avoid getting sued.
- Inflated medical school costs
- the price of a huge bureaucracy for billing people, chasing them, disputing it, agreeing rates with insurers, renegotiating rates with insurers, applying the right discounts, billing a dozen different state and federal programs for various bits, those being disputed, managing all that etc.
To be clear: I totally agree w/ you that the AMA is a cartel.
If you spent $0 on drugs next year, we would not save that much money.
If you want to cut spending, you need to cut spending on doctors and hospitals.
If you want sources for these numbers, here is the National Health Expenditure summary from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Studies:
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
Because up until a few weeks ago, people weren't allowed to see what hospitals charged until AFTER getting their bill. It was a ridiculous system, and I'm glad Trump got rid of it.
For example ultrasonic diagnosis of your frozen shoulder is 600 Euros in USA, 200 Euros in Finland and 80 Euros in Vilnius.
This issue is relevant, because European healthcare wont fix your shoulder, because it is a "cosmetic problem" and will disappear on its own in a year or two.