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Comment by lxm | Hacker News Reader

Average nurse salary in the US: $82,750

Average nurse salary in California (where ~10% of US population lives): $124,000

Average nurse salary in Spain: €29,277

My sources are probably junk, but even with insurance companies out of the picture what is the math that would make the US healthcare cheaper?

This is without tackling the earning rates for specialty MDs, like vascular surgeons, who are not that numerous to begin with.

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Compare the cost of living of Spain to the US (food, rent, public transit) my friend. What makes the cost of CARE cheaper is less administrative agents/overhead.

Hypothetically then places with high concentration of beneficiaries covered by a single-payer system (Medicare) should have markedly cheaper medical care, lower overhead costs and all.

Yet https://www.wfla.com/community/health/coronavirus/florida-ha...

I suspect demographics are part of why Florida hospital costs are so high. The youngest state in the USA is Utah. The state has a median age of just 31. They have some of the least expensive hospitals in the country.

1. Medicare only covers the most expensive in terms of health care costs demographic. Knowing nothing else I’d expect having more people on Medicare to correspond with higher costs per capita. We make 25 year old men who statistically have nearly no healthcare costs buy insurance while providing it to their 90 year old grand parent.

2. Medicare was not allowed to negotiate drug prices until this year. Drug comonies basically got to wr8te themselves checks. In some ways the Us taxpayer subsidizes drug development for the whole world.

Now normalize those numbers by cost of living.

And type of nurse. Big difference in pay between an rn, Lpn, msn, crnp, but one might colloquially refer to all as a “nurse” (except maybe the crnp). Position matters too. A travel er nurse is going to make significantly more than an outpatient primary care office nurse

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