Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)
randomcriticalanalysis.com
randomcriticalanalysis.com
What I'm unclear on is whether "health spending", in this analysis, is defined as money paid to care providers such as hospitals and dentists, or money paid by citizens for healthcare. Because you've got insurers and PBMs taking profit.
The ratio of those two numbers is the efficiency of the American insurance model. How does it compare to the administration of a single-payer system such as the NHS?
Until I see some data indicating otherwise, I'm going to look at my £200pcm national insurance and my £9.90 prescriptions and my free ambulances, and Americans' $500pcm insurance and their unlimited prescription costs and their four-figure bills even when insured, and I'm going to continue to believe that Americans are punching themselves in the face.
I am currently prescribed a medication that is over $30,000 per injection every 12 weeks.
Because we have absolutely atrocious health organization. Pharmaceutical companies can set their prices regardless of anything but their profit.
This should apply to food, water, housing, health care, transportation, internet; all those good things that you can't do without and are extremely vulnerable to market manipulation.
Price controls are Hobson's choice: Would you prefer expensive bread, or no bread?
And, to many, the difference between "expensive bread" and "no bread" in the case of drugs is entirely academic.
This obviously kind of sucks when the drug is the difference between life and death, but those are also the drugs we most want a large incentive to develop, and that's why the patents eventually expire.
> Consider the example of a Taylor Swift concert. Are scalpers creating more supply by raising the prices of tickets or is it pure rent seeking?
Scalpers are trading time for money. You want tickets that would otherwise sell out but you don't want to wait in line, so you pay someone to wait in line for you. It causes tickets to be available at the higher price instead of being sold out and unavailable at any price. The way to prevent the rent seeking is to auction off the tickets to begin with so the money goes to the artist instead of the scalpers.
* A little extra space in your dwelling * Internet * Access to nature * Hot water * Some means of transportation that grants you access to work, home, and recreation * Leisure time beyond that needed to cook, clean, sleep, and exercise * Some dietary variety * Any functioning smartphone * Access to community * A modest amount of extra money for recreation * Any vacation time * Access to heat/cooling beyond the bare minimum * Access to education * More than one choice in a job * A bed that doesn't hurt you
The list could likely be trimmed or made narrower, and there are likely things I'm not thinking of, but you get the idea. Nothing extravegent or necessarily expensive, just a few things beyond the absolute bare minimum a human needs to survive. Basically, I think everyone should have access to three major things: 1. The necessities of survival 2. A few extras to allow the unmotivated and unambitious to be sustainably content and not truly miserable from true deprivation (so, like, evaluate human needs the way a modern ethical zoo evaluates animal needs rather than a historical abusive menagerie would). 3. Access to tools and resources for the sufficiently ambitious to reasonably improve their situation without making excessive sacrifices from point 1 or 2.
Does any of that strike you as unreasonable or unachievable?
How does this determine how much the license fee should be?
1) OK... maybe we should stop, then? Like, that seems like a terrible deal? How is that a justification at all? It seems like just a description of something very stupid we're doing.
2) This would be a good deal if we were getting other countries to also pay high prices and bringing that money "home", but basically the exact opposite is happening. WTF.
3) More often than not, the side of the issue that raises this as a good thing is also the side full of folks who think we should e.g. reduce spending on foreign aid, so it's especially weird that they're bringing it up.
Plus, I'm very skeptical that the idea that drug development would dramatically slow down if the US stopped over-spending to the tune of 2x-100x on lots of drugs is even true. But setting that aside, it's still just a bizarre line of argument, to me.
If you move faster than the science and the lawsuits, then you can keep selling deadly crap to a naïve and trusting populace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reye_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
The US pays for drug development and then the rest of the world caps prices and gets the drugs cheaper. If the US stops then the money for drug development goes down, which is not great. What you really want is to get the other countries to pay their share, but how do you propose to do that?
Price caps set a very explicit bar and then ask a company to think very carefully if they truly think the drug can't be sold at that price (and surprise: turns out when motivated a ton of them discover that yes, it can be).
1. An expectation of profit at the end. 2. A highly desired outcome from a motivated pool of Investors.
Price caps can dampen #1. Which can put more of the burden on #2 as a source of funding. Whether you think that is an improvement or not probably depends on your particular ideological position around markets and healthcare.
But there is definitely an objective argument to be made that this might decrease the speed of improvements in healthcare technology.
Every American posts about "healthcare improvements" like they're a millionaire and that cancer wouldn't bankrupt them (and then also get them fired from their job when their insurer casually mentions the "bad risk" they've got which is driving up the cost right now).
A slower pace for rare ailments seems like an obviously acceptable trade off.
Then subsidize, on purpose and directly, not by some lopsided roundabout more-expensive-than-it-needs-to-be scheme, if problems arise.
Quite a bit of the high pricing for Americans is also by companies who _don’t even do_ R&D to any significant extent; companies who only make generic price them dramatically higher in the US than elsewhere.
They cannot pay with money, but honestly speaking they could "pay" with risk taking, I mean trying drugs that the FDA is too risk averse to approve . For example the risk profile of basically every day activity is much much higher in India or Nigeria compared to the U.S. and so the same should be for drugs, medicine is an extremely risk averse field as it is, but with the FDA being the world authority over medicine safety basically the risk profile of the US is being transferred over to the rest of the world which is nuts. Consider for example the risk profile of daily driving in the U.S. vs India or Thailand where everybody goes around in scooters without helmets, it works for them, their economy would collapse if they tried to have the safety of the U.S. drivers going around with 20ft long 7500lbs cars.
The unfortunate thing is that the whole world relies not only on the U.S. for drug research but also drug approval. If the FDA says no to something then not even Lesotho would try it , even though maybe from a risk reward standpoint it would make so much sense for Lesotho to try it .
The recent "negotiated prices" for Medicare drugs could be the beginning of the end for this system though.
The majority of basic research is done in academic research laboratories which are predominantly funded by government research grants. If one of these studies pans out and something can be patented, a business or investor group may license the patent and fund an applied R&D program with the goal of getting through FDA trials. This effort is either funded by investor capital or internal company funds (likely from revenues from the sales of FDA approved medications or other products). Presumably if a business or investor group has a track record of bringing treatments to market (e.g. having a revenue stream from a previously economically successful product) they are entitled with the option to invest more funds, etc.
Between 2019 and 2022 there were like 88 biotech IPO lockup expirations and only 3 were trading higher than post lockup for any period of time.
Macro determines the rate of risk taking. Not “details.” You simply 100% cannot have drug discovery without risk, and risk wants returns.
Should we have low rates and high inflation for the sake of more “discovery of medical techniques?” Inflation and high costs: dude, they are exactly the same thing!
The way Trump touted an invention from the German company BioNTech as "Invented in America".
"Nothing is purely German or American nowadays."
I know that, not everyone seems to though:
"I've heard it quipped that Americans are subsidizing the discovery of new medical techniques for the rest of the world."
And not even nowadays. Like with the Wright Brothers, who used data from Otto Lilienthal.
But the Wikipedia article could not stop trying to minimize his impact,
"Lilienthal's research was well known to the Wright brothers, and they credited him as a major inspiration for their decision to pursue manned flight."
where someone felt the need to add
"They abandoned his aeronautical data after two seasons of gliding and began using their own wind tunnel data."
and make it all about the Wright Brothers. In an article about "Otto Lilienthal" not the Wright Brothers.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss Karikó's and Weissman's discovery of replacement of uridine with pseudouridine as merely "writing a paper". It was a pretty crucial technological stepping stone that made mRNA treatment orders of magnitude less dangerous to humans. Same with their discovery of the way how to deliver mRNA into cells (using lipid nanoparticles).
The NHS isn't really a "single-payer system" in any meaningful sense. In the UK, most healthcare providers are employed directly by the government and their wages are fixed below the market rate to control costs. There are internal financial transfers but there aren't really arms-length negotiations and payments between separate payer and provider organizations.
If the USA was to adopt a single-payer system like the various "Medicare for All" proposals that politicians have floated that wouldn't do much to reduce costs. Any meaningful cost reduction for the system as a whole would require driving down provider wages, rationing care, and ending the way that we subsidize drug development costs for the rest of the world. Those measures might be good things to do on balance, but they aren't politically popular.
They must follow their own discipline set in their founding documents.
Calling blue cross blue shield nonprofit is disingenuous as they made $749,000,000 in 2022.
Per their 990’s: https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/view_990/135656874/101...
Anyhow, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield system has a very complex structure so if you're looking to find where the real money is being siphoned off it's unlikely to be at the top. BC/BS affiliates are independent, that's why the org at the top for a system insuring over a hundred million people pulls in less than a billion dollars in revenue.
Source: Ran a nonprofit for a few years that made money doing software consulting
If I can only make 10% profit (or whatever the law is), what is my incentive to keep healthcare costs down? The ONLY way I can grow my income if it healthcare costs go up. 10% profit on a $100 medication is way less than 10% profit on a $1,000,000 medication. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Another disingenuous argument on non-profits. Is all of Blue Cross Blue Shield non-profit or only the certain parts you want us to look at? A 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' argument.
Final disingenuous argument is you just asserting 'meaningful cost reduction'. There is no way ambulance rides went from $200 to $10,000 because of EMT pay.
Absolutely not. EMT pay can be as low as $12 an hour.
You're missing the step where you also have to increase premiums, i.e. price. And what normally keeps any seller from increasing their prices whenever they want is competition--some other insurer will get your business.
That begs the question of how competitive the insurance market is. Let's assume it's woefully uncompetitive. But in that case I don't see how the ACA 80/20 rule on administrative overhead changes incentives and the evolution of price inflation one way or another. At best it temporarily disrupted existing inflationary schemes, at worst it does nothing.
Commercial health plans have conflicting financial incentives. Most of them no longer provide much insurance (in terms of bearing financial risk) but rather primarily act as administrators for self-insured employers. So while payers can potentially boost short-term profits by paying out higher claims, employers comparison shop between competing health plans every year. Your HR department would happily switch from Aetna to Cigna (or whatever) next year if their analytics forecast shows that would save a few dollars on expected claims.
Ambulance fees are a mess but those represent a tiny fraction of overall US healthcare spending. Some reform there would be a good idea but that wouldn't do much to reduce costs.
Significant systemic cost reductions will require some mix of lower provider wages, care rationing, and reduced spending on new drug and device development. Countries with more socialized healthcare systems are more financially efficient in some ways but they also just do less stuff: less drug development, longer queues for advanced treatments, underpaid doctors (relative to market wages), care restrictions based on QALYs (or similar metrics). Complaints about payer profits, while perhaps somewhat legitimate in certain cases, are largely a distraction from more fundamental problems. That's just basic math dictated by the cashflows. There are no simple solutions and we're eventually going to have to make hard choices. No one wants to face this reality.
I wrote hospital medical software for 20 years passing on way better pay because I wanted to make a difference. And I gave up because the system WANTS to be how it is today. Everyone in medical is CHOOSING to make it this way, then claiming 'ah it's too big, it's too complicated, we can't change it'. Americans being to scared to call an ambulance means emergency care has completely failed them, not a small little thing to be brushed off. Americans are making hard choices about medical care every day already.
The system can't want anything. It isn't even really a "system" in any meaningful way, in the sense of being a unified entity working towards a common goal. US healthcare is just a bunch of disconnected people and organizations pursuing their own interests, often in conflict with each other. Any major improvements will require changes at the federal policy level to better align incentives with desired outcomes. This is hard because we collectively can't even agree on the desired outcomes or how to measure them. I mean at a high level most people think that everyone should have convenient, affordable access to high-quality care but once you get into specifics everything gets complicated and making trade-offs which disadvantage some voters is unpopular. Like should we spend $100K to give a terminal cancer patient another month of life? Should surgeons make $700K per year?
It's easy to complain and cast blame. And we should certainly cut out waste and abuse where we find it. But that won't significantly move the needle on overall system costs. The problems are much more fundamental.
Well said. That this could be equally applied to the US as a whole likely explains subsidiary disfunctions.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/Quarterly_Es...
It's easy for populists to demonize health insurance companies. But even if we somehow magically cut all payer profits to zero that would only marginally reduce total system costs. Much of what they do in fighting against doctors by negotiating lower reimbursement rates and denying claims that don't meet coverage rules actually helps to control costs for their main customers, the large self-insured employers that purchase health plans for their employees. At the national policy level, one change that would probably help would be breaking the linkage between employment and health plan coverage in order to better align incentives.
Other countries that spend less on healthcare also have lower provider wages, longer queues for advanced treatments, rationed care based on QALYs (or similar metrics), and less innovation in drugs and medical devices. Maybe that would be better overall but let's not pretend that there aren't severe trade-offs. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
About 4% of bankruptcies are from medical bills.
the fraction of people filing for bankruptcy who happen to have substantial medical expenses.
The only factor they considered was the proportion of people who filed for bankruptcy by years before/after hospitalization, which they found was about 4% of total bankruptcies - for non-elderly adults.
we estimate that hospitalizations cause only 4% of personal bankruptcies among nonelderly U.S. adults, which is an order of magnitude smaller than the previous estimates described above.
It is also notable that the study was focused on patients at a single Californian hospital -
we therefore selected a sample of people who were admitted to the hospital in California
Our study was based on a random stratified sample of adults 25 to 64 years of age who, between 2003 and 2007, were admitted to the hospital (for a non–pregnancy-related stay) for the first time in at least 3 years
We have found that hospitalizations cause: *increased out-of-pocket spending on medical care*, *increased medical debt*, and decreased employment and income
Americans always toss this out like it means something. If you're not in queue because you can't afford it, then you are in the queue it's just infinitely long but you're not counted.
Your entire culture here is so broken you are fundamentally incapable of even beginning to understand how other countries discuss these metrics: when they discuss wait times it's for everyone who needs it - no one is unable to afford it or being denied it by their health insurance. "The queue" is triaged against available resources - i.e. patients needing urgent care will get it earlier then those who are stable.
Could it be shorter? Of course it could, but it also includes everyone who needs it. And if you don't like the queue the gasp you can still pay to be treated privately and receive prompter service under most systems.
Your system is so broken you literally can't comprehend the wording of complaints about other systems because you contextualize it through your own. Built into the entire model is that "the queue is long and also we already kicked a bunch of people out of it, which is not what anyone is talking about in regards to the NHS, or Australian Medicare or any other system.
It's pretty common to see affluent Canadians come to the US as medical tourists and pay out of pocket for procedures like MRI scans or joint replacement surgery. This is a real thing that happens all the time. Depending on your perspective that might be acceptable in the name of fairness and cost control but there are always trade-offs.
There are also untold hours lost in unpaid labor on the part of “clients” messing with insurance and hospital billing departments. It’s not uncommon for someone who is, or is connected to a person who is, seriously sick for even a few days to spend a work-week or more of time that year messing with the billing from the incident. This can include uneventful pregnancies and births.
Forget any of the squishy humanitarian impulses behind "socializing" medicine; eliminating all that un-productive labor would be of immense economic benefit.
(Health-plan administrative cost is a moat which advantages large businesses to the detriment of small. That goes some way to explaining why an economic-efficiency / dynamism argument has never gained traction in American political discourse.)
I wanted to get travel vaccinations in New Orleans. In my ignorance, I just looked up a clinic and went. Apparently I don't understand the coding for black clinic.
It was a shack with 30 poor rural black women sitting motionless on mismatched folding chairs. We sat and sweated for an hour; no practitioner or even receptionist appeared.
I don't think there was a phone at that shack. There weren't many cars about, so those women probably walked a decent distance to sit and wait.
One of them had an enormous tumour on her face.
It could be that we just killed the vibe. But these women were motionless. Like waiting was all they did. I believe they waited in that shack for days in a row.
We went to that clinic from a bar where we'd been drinking seven-dollar beers while a waspy college band played poor-hillbilly music to oyster-guzzling yuppies in raybans.
I've generally found Americans to be smart, humble, funny, kind and warm. But when I encounter an American being arrogant or self-centred, I think about that New Orleans shack.
I am not defending either system - I would strongly prefer something like the rest of continental Europe, which is a pragmatic mix of private and public healthcare. However, the idea that fully-public healthcare (a unique experiment in the world) is a sustainable model is a joke. It's hard to defend, when our current standard healthcare at the point of service could charitably be called "usually better than the 3rd world".
I went as a young man. I may have misunderstood how it works. I don't know how cost-effective it is.
600chf sounds like passable value for money, as long as you get excellent care and as long as that's all you pay.
But my concern is always what happens to the poor. Yeah, yeah, the Swiss are rich - but not literally every Swiss, I presume.
Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect in any country.
Don't conflate bankruptcies. _Purely financial_ bankruptcy is recoverable, given good health and time. (Not to trivialise it.) But, for a peasant with terminal cancer: _medical_ bankruptcy generally means a miserable and undignified death. There's worse pain than pain, you know?
So, while I have to respect the dispassionate argument that "not _that_ many people die in a ditch", I reply that my £200 buys me not just passable healthcare but also some pride in my nation finding some fucking compassion.
That moral point is also an economic point, but I'm not ready to articulate it concisely. Let me say simply that a nation needs to find character on the way up and then again on the way back down, and America is currently fumbling for the second step. A nation is founded on its citizens. The cost of a zeitgeist of rage and distrust is, eventually, everything. What price empire?
sarah_eu brought up Switzerland, in comparison to the UK NHS. I don't know what percentage of Swiss bankruptcies are because of medical bills, but can cite the statistic for the US (which of course is the main topic here). Also, as I alluded to, "[insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies in the US are because of medical bills" is a common incorrect trope in/about the US, which I wanted to fend off before it came up yet again.
>But, for a peasant with terminal cancer: _medical_ bankruptcy generally means a miserable and undignified death.
Obamacare mandated that the 15%[1] of Americans pre-Obamacare that did not have health insurance get it or pay a penalty. The figure is 8% now.
And before you say "Well, that's not 100%", while the penalty for Obamacare noncompliance is not high enough, 92% of Americans having health insurance is not very far from the 95-97% elsewhere, and some large share of the 8% is from illegal aliens who are ineligible or avoid signing up for government health insurance. In every country there are people who fall between the cracks, whether a German who neglects to sign up for a new sickness fund after changing jobs, or a Canadian who neglects to sign up for a new provincial health care card after moving. The only way to get actual 100% coverage is to use the UK NHS model of having no membership card at all.
[1] Yes, 85% of Americans before Obamacare had health insurance. How many of you non-Americans (heck, many Americans) thought that "0% of Americans have healthcare" before or after Obamacare? It's OK; you're not alone in believing everything you read on Reddit.
I'm going to hazard a semi-informed guess (I grew up in Switzerland, live in the US), that 0% of Swiss bankruptcies are because of medicals bills.
And https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-93430900525-7/fulltext disagrees with you, claiming 62% of US bankruptcies are due to medical bills... (other links report somewhat lower figures, e.g., https://www.self.inc/info/medical-debt-bankruptcies-statisti..., but definitely nothing as low as 4%).
The numbers you cite are the percent of bankruptcies that include medical debt. The data doesn't say the medical debt caused the bankruptcy, or that this debt type was the largest percentage of debt. People declaring bankruptcy typically have many types of debt as they generally fall behind on all their bills.
There are subsidies available to low-income households. I'm unsure about the specifics as subsidies differ from one canton to another and usually depend on your income and family status.
(and in fact being the cause of rising costs because that is where they are going to spend their disposable income),
the median USian will not.
Partially this also comes from statistical effects that aren't scale-invariant :
Countries with more people are more rich (including per capita).
Countries that are richer are more inequal.
Countries with more people are more inequal.
I think it costs more than that!
> don't care about loosing (sic) an extra 300 USD on health insurance
It's the difference we allegedly don't care about. But they're claiming the cost is $500/mo, not $300/mo.
Still, I think they're wrong: $300/mo or $3,600/y would be a decent sum to a lot of people that they would like to have, to spend on things like housing or basic items.
Also, my searching says $500/mo is a bit below the average single-person coverage premium. And if you have a family, my Google searches suggest you'd love to see $500/mo for healthcare, as you're paying >>$500/mo.
Even if we (I think generously) use $500/mo, I think we can only generously call that a premium-only number. But if you're comparing my private insurance premiums to a nation with universal/government insurance, I think you have to add in both the higher costs I pay out of pocket for things insurance won't cover, and the taxes I pay for government healthcare programs.
Ofcourse what it really comes down to if poor people deserve healthcare or if we should just pretend that they don't exist (the state of healthcare in Europe before WW2).
We know they don't[1]:
> For the year 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $47,960; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $60,070.
The upthread's figure is $/mo; the higher (full-time) figure there is $5005/mo.
$9k/mo is within top 20%'tile. Every trying to read the statement as "most Americans" doesn't work.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
They survey all of the possible healthcare goods and services available across OECD nations, make their best attempt to select a representative basket that is both available across all nations and reasonably similar, then estimate what they call a "quasi-price" per unit of good and/or service, to account for the fact that the actual charged price is often artificially suppressed or set to zero by government fiat. This seems to be done by scouring management accounting databases to figure out what the payers and providers consider to be reasonable reimbursement rates for accounting purposes, whether or not that is what they actually receive.
I get what they're trying to do, but this probably explains some of the counterintuive results, because mostly people are probably thinking more along the lines of "add up all premiums paid to insurers, out of pocket expenses paid directly by consumers to providers, and all government outlays classified as healthcare" and that's how much your country spends on healthcare.
That's a reasonable comparison to make, but as the blog and the OECD report both point out, it does nothing to account for differences in quantity and quality of healthcare goods being paid for. The problem is this discourse then inevitably leads to "well the US gets worse outcomes," but to what extent is that fair? The only reason I can walk today is because of US healthcare. If you incur a musculoskeletal injury that requires intervention in various different countries, how likely are you to fully recover? If you get cancer, how likely are you to go into remission? I don't necessarily know exactly what should be measured, but I know that when the discussion goes straight to lifespan, that is heavily confounded. Americans drive more, own more guns, are fatter. There has been tremendous industrial pollution in various places, though I don't know how that compares to the rest of the OECD. I wouldn't be surprised if we have more backyard pools. There are many, many reasons we might live shorter lives that have nothing at all to do with the quality of the healthcare we receive.
> The ratio of those two numbers is the efficiency of the American insurance model.
The ratio of those two numbers is quite divorced from the efficiency of an insurance model.
On the one side, this would count wasteful spending on unnecessary tests or overpriced services as an efficiency improvement because proportionally more money is going to providers. On the other side, if insurers better at preventing fraud have lower premiums and therefore get more customers and make more money, that would count as "inefficiency" and the fraud prevented would also count as inefficiency (because that money went to "providers"), even if the net result is less fraud and lower premiums.
That isn't to say that the US system is efficient. It's clearly quite broken. But its brokenness is because the government has been thoroughly captured by the industry -- which is the providers as much as the insurers -- and they oppose any measures that would improve actual efficiency because the inefficiency is their profit. Which is why the US system costs more than the systems in other countries regardless of whether the other countries use public or private systems.
An efficient regulatory system for a private insurance market would be something like, a schedule of service codes where each provider is required to publish a fee schedule representing the uniform fee paid by all institutional insurers, eliminating the overhead of "negotiating prices" (a major source of inefficiency) in favor of price transparency and allowing patients and insurers to choose a provider on the basis of price and distance, while still subjecting providers to competitive pressure because people would naturally favor providers with lower fees. But the existing US system doesn't do that at all.
https://www.cms.gov/healthplan-price-transparency/plans-and-...
Longer term though we should move away from the fee-for-service model based on providers submitting claims for service codes. A value-based care model where provider organizations bear at least some financial risk and are accountable for patient outcomes will probably work better for everyone.
They made a little progress toward it but the providers are fighting it every way they can. Apparently one of the methods is to use many different codes for the same thing so they can't easily be compared. You need to get to the point where it's like a price comparison service; your doctor tells you to get a scan and you get a list of every service in the country that offers it, sortable by both price to you and distance from your house. They should also eliminate the premise of "in-network" and just have all providers publish their prices and insurers publish the amount they cover in your region.
> A value-based care model where provider organizations bear at least some financial risk and are accountable for patient outcomes will probably work better for everyone.
It would probably be better to combine them, i.e. you get primary care your way but when primary care wants you to get a scan or take a medication you have competing providers. Lumping the entire network into one entity is likely to lead to market consolidation and then inefficiency.
I'm not sure what you mean about different codes for the same thing. The health plan MRFs all use the same CPT/HCPCS codes. Each code has a unique meaning.
Health plan member portals also have online shopping tools where you can do price comparisons for every network provider within a certain distance. So what you're asking for pretty much already exists, although many consumers aren't aware of this.
If I can't get this, there's no price transparency. Of course it's even worse than this in practice, since not only can no one tell me my out-of-pocket cost for a service I'm about to purchase, they can't tell me what the negotiated rate is going to be, and it could be over a year before anyone can tell me either the negotiated rate or my share of the negotiated rate. (Odds are it will take at least a month and these figures will be renegotiated multiple times before I get a bill.)
https://www.cms.gov/healthplan-price-transparency/consumers
Reimbursement rates are negotiated between payers and network providers at most once per year. Rates don't change monthly.
What's to stop providers cherry-picking who they treat? Who's going to treat the patients who are high risk? That will ruin the outcomes metric?
I'm not disagreeing w/ the theory of your proposal. I haven't - yet? - seen how it can actually work.
https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/innovation-models/...
For ACO agreements between provider organizations and commercial payers, the parties can negotiate any contract terms they like. The agreements are usually confidential but payers aren't naive about this stuff and are fully aware of how to protect their financial interests against cherry picking by providers.
Examples:
Cheaper plans with more restrictions could exist more broadly. Consumers don’t want them, politicians make hay on the consumer unhappiness and ban the things that allow the plans to be cheap in the first place.
I agree on "HMO" being tainted. Kaiser has a good reputation in its territories, as does Intermountain, the other big western US integrated system.
So on the ground level, it's already clear some of our highest paid most valuable people spend 20-30% of their time on a flavor of administrative junk which isn't necessary in a single-payer system. I'm skeptical of claims that this waste doesn't translate into the higher level metrics.
On a more serious note: that might be hard in medicine per se to pay for “results”. And I found some of the insights from “Outlive” quite interesting: how we focus in cure but not prevention; and how in the bigger scheme of things Antibiotics was almost the only “real big invention” in western medicine for a very long time (e.g., in terms of actual medical impact)
A search will find you plenty of articles about this.
That and the nature of the relationship introduces conflict. Plus the bulk of provincial governments administrating the thing are ideologically biased against it because they are conservative or neo-liberal in bent, and have been chronically underfunding it for years....
How else would you measure it? Survival rates? Doctors now have a strong incentive to avoid taking on sick patients.
This is most definitely not just a US problem. I work adjacent to this industry in Poland, where we basically have a single-payer system[1], and I'd say 20-30% is definitely in the ballpark.
Especially in larger institutions (think hospital, not a single doctor's office), records must be kept and handovers between different doctors must occur. This means that you have to do all this work anyway, regardless of how much of it is actually transmitted to the insurance provider, and in our case, it's definitely far, far too little.
[1] we do have private healthcare, but that's typically small / less-complicated procedures and usually covered out-of-pocket by those who can afford it, so there are no insurance considerations there.
I wonder if this could be the killer app for AI. Teach it how to do this sort of bureaucracy instead of humans, and let doctors treat actual people instead.
The claim is that the size of the pot of money to be split is determined by the willingness of consumers to pay. Which is determined by their wealth. Therefore the inclusion of a lot of administration changes the split of where that money goes. More administration = less money for nurses and doctors. Less administration = more money for nurses and doctors.
This fits observed behavior in other places. Your potential client has a problem and a potential budget for the solution. Clients are remarkably indifferent to how that budget is split up, as long as a solution to the problem is worth spending the budget. Here is the example that originally brought this point home to me. When Oracle moved from Solaris to Linux around the year 2000, it was able to charge more money for the database. Why? Because companies were willing to spend money on Oracle that previously went to the hardware and operating system. This incentive to open source the complement of whatever product you're providing is one of the reasons why so much money has been invested into creating open source.
However your willingness to spend at the moment of crisis is dictated by your problem and available wealth. And now how that money is going to be split among different parties.
It’s not just for that. Documentation and checklists exist in public health systems, too, and IIRC there’s some fairly hard evidence that they do reduce errors. Doctors hate them, tho.
I was in hospital a few years back for a fairly inoffensive surgical procedure (public hospital, though in Ireland’s rather weird hybrid system, because I had private insurance my insurance was paying), and I’d say I was asked at least ten times if I was allergic to anything, and had the barcode on my wristband read more times than I can count. This was extremely irritating… but apparently it does _work_; some patients don’t always give the same answer to that question every time.
By choice. Medical coders are a dime a dozen. Front office/back office/in office. You hire and train other people or you whine and complain, and be unproductive. Hopefully you will get one of the smart ones who understand this.
They list their source as 2017 OECD data. OECD seems to define this as:
"Health spending is the final consumption of health care goods and services including personal health care and collective services."
Their charts are also drawn in a standard and more understandable way.[0]
> Americans are punching themselves in the face.
Hurtful, but okay, I do hope you realize it's the rampant monopolization of health care that is the problem in this country. Yours solved it by simply creating a single publicly held monopoly.
It's not as if either system is perfect and doesn't create it's own share and particular style of inhumane healthcare outcomes. Prescription label prices are noticeably different but are they meaningfully different where outcomes are concerned?
[0]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
Prices rose with inflation until 1968, when they started angling up steeply. 1968 was soon after the advent of Medicaid and Medicare.
The 1962 FDA amendments also resulted in a steep rise in drug costs, and a sharp reduction in new drugs being developed.
> Why?
I don't know how other countries manage their health care systems, though I know that the British one is facing bankruptcy, and while health care was free in the Soviet Union patients had to pay for anesthetic for root canals, and bribery was the norm.
Here's a link to what's wrong with the American system:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
No it isn't.
The nhs budget was 181 billion. Half of all government money appears to be going to healthcare.
https://www.amazon.com/Competition-Monopoly-Medical-Care-Fre...
But the big government push into health care happened in the 60's.
Another big driver of American health care costs is the FDA:
https://www.amazon.com/Regulation-Pharmaceutical-Innovation-...
To be clear because that's easy to misunderstand: despite the fact Americans do not have universal public health care, the government already spends as much as many European countries that do, per capita. Part of this, of course, is because US public health care spending is concentrated on the old (Medicare) and disabled/poor (Medicaid). But it's still a shocking testament to US health care costs.
In my defense, I'm attempting to perform data operations on a kilo of fatty grey meat from a savanna hominid. I've been meaning to upgrade but have you seen gpu prices lately.
It's also completely ignoring the possibility of Hollywood-style accounting.
One thing I'm curious about is any correlations to number of grandchildren.
This is a odd position to take. You're going to firmly hold onto a view despite admitting it's not that informed?
Not to mention you're not even comparing the right costs. What the patient pays is not the total cost.
Let the record state that this account got into my inbox in the seconds between my reply and me blocking it. Zero time spent in reflection.
If there's a human behind that account, be told that when you grossly misrepresent a person, the injustice tends to make them angry.
I put thought, into my top level, on the best way to spark a discussion. There was none before, yet my comment has received a bunch of detailed and thought-provoking replies. I have encouraged a tolerably productive conversation. People are continuing without me. This is my first good HN comment.
I put my beliefs, _which I hold lightly_, up in the air expressly to be shot down. I've read every reply, and learned things I didn't know. I'm proud of that top level comment.
Hopefully, the block works this time. I really _really_ do not want you in my inbox, amongst the valuable people.
So please, have the courtesy to
## FUCK OFF
Effective tax rates of 40-70% do not exist in the Us. It’s still a ridiculous amount of the economy to tax and spend.
But what I think is more annoying is that the US has health systems for special interest groups:
- seniors - veterans - native Americans - women and children - government employees (especially teachers) - immigrants seeking asylum
This must be getting close to half the population. Either get rid of them, or pay for everyone.
That isn’t true. In Germany, where we have fairly high taxes, I get to keep about 60% of my gross income, and I’m in the maximum taxation group. This 40% includes universal health care, pensions, tax, and mandatory insurance for job loss.
https://www.securite-sociale.fr/la-secu-cest-quoi/chiffres-c...
That said, for _most_ countries, 40-70% effective tax is very high, and not encountered by the average person. To pay 40% effective in Ireland, say, you’d have to be earning at least 150k, and that’s assuming you’re single, have no kids, don’t pay rent or mortgage, and have no private pension (401k equivalent) contributions. Realistically, almost no-one hits those sorts of rates; for realistic setups you’re looking at closer to 200k for a single childless person.
It is impossible, here, outside of ultra-contrived circumstances, to pay over a 52% effective tax rate.
It depends on what you include though. You could look at someone earning 100k, having it taxed, paying all the things that are not taxes but obligatory just the same (social security, depending on the country), and then spending the rest on rent, travel, food & entertainment (and paying sales tax and various other specific taxes). How much of their total income has gone to the state?
If you want to extend that comparison, look at someone running a company. The value they create with their company will be taxed as well, then they receive dividends from their company which also will be taxed at different rates.
Of course, you'd need to either compare to individual US states, or make some choices about how to average their very different tax levels.
Someone earning 100k (assuming single, no kids, no private pension) pays about 33% effective tax (including social security) and some VAT on spending. 50-70%, again, is just kinda nonsense.
"Some VAT on spending" is a bit hand-wavy, don't you think? If you take those 67k (probably a bit less in Germany, because you'll pay for health insurance one way or another, and it's not a 100% deduction) and spend it, most of that will be at the normal VAT rate, which in Europe is between 15 and 27%, the average is approximately 20%. That'll be another 10k or so (or another 10% of income), you're now at ~43%.
Buying gas for your car (~50% of sale price are taxes), or natural gas (~30% taxes), oil (20%), or electricity (27%) for your home, and you'll pay taxes, too. There's various small amount (~250€/yr for public television; nominally not a tax in Germany for legal reasons, but it would be dishonest not to include it -- it is by law, there's no way to opt out, you don't have a claim to anything in return, its height is controlled by the state), it adds up.
I doubt you could get to 70%, but 50% isn't far off if you actually spend your money (which you will have to at some point, so I don't see a reason why you wouldn't consider those taxes).
Okay, that's _really_ different to how it works in Ireland, and I think just shows the government trying to incentivise slightly different things. I think the key difference is that, per the above, dividends are taxed as capital gains in Germany (weird; they're clearly not capital gains); in Ireland they're deemed unearned income and taxed more or less as normal income (with some slightly weird treatment at the edges, I think; I'm not sure that you can offset income tax on them with pension contributions, say).
I'm a bit curious _why_ Germany wants to incentivise retention and payout via dividend vs payout via salary for small companies (it seems like, for high income people, corporate tax + dividend there would probably be lower than the highest band of tax?) but that's clearly what's going on here.
But since limited liability is a pretty good thing to have and is affordable now, these days many people opt for it, especially if you're somewhat successful because one of the disadvantages is increased accounting duties -- but if you make more than 50k (or something thereabout; in profits) without a limited liability, they'll apply the same duties to you.
Corporate tax + dividends is usually more expensive than personal income. On 100k profits, you'll pay 30k taxes, and then you'll distribute 70k of which 25% are tax (capital gains), so another 17.5k gone, and you've paid 47% until the money is yours. Top marginal income tax is 45% (250k+/yr). Accountants are technically optional, but practically mandatory for LLCs, and they cost 2-3% of revenue (by law, no negotiations possible).
Germany very much doesn't like self-employment when you look at it from that angle. But I doubt there's an intention behind it, it's mostly historical: limited liability is supposed to be the larger companies, not an electrician with two employees. But Germany doesn't adjust, so our 2nd highest marginal tax rate (42%) starts at 66k€, which around 10% of employees in Germany hit, and it rarely gets adjusted to account for inflation. But no worries: there's been a lot of noise to increase this to 57%, payable on income > 80k€. We'll get to the 70% eventually.
The EU either has to integrate muslims, which is a rougher ride, or Russians/Ukrainians, of which there is a more limited number to import.
The country with the worst demographics, South Korea, still IMO has an out: it can topple North Korea and import a huge number of people from there.
China is in deep, deep trouble. They have restated demographics downward, and probably it is still worse than that. Combined with increasing levels of totalitarianism, allegedly a huge financial house of cards in real estate and regional governments, and a likely invasion of Taiwan that results in blockade and sanctions...
Russia was having huge problems before the war. Now they are throwing away a badly needed generation, and causing 2-5x that amount to flee the country.
Democracies have the potential to pivot from demographic disaster, but totalitarian regimes don't care about them, because demographic cliffs mean there is just an older more compliant population to suppress. Of course it means long term their country will fade to irrelevance and perhaps starvation/economic collapse, but totalitarian regimes exist primarily to ensure the survival of the regime, not the population.
Indeed, but, even Mexico and much of Latin America now has below replacement fertility too. So now what?
Democracies that entice immigration are also strategic weapons.
But to answer your question, that's their problem.
Countries and governments need to wake up and structure their societies towards liberal reforms to get encourage child rearing. That involves a host of things that the right won't like, but the side effects will be a society that people want to immigrate too.
It's a double demographic effect. Now, so far even Europe has not restructured its housing, work, subsidies, childcare, and the like to fully stimulate demographics.
The US would need huge reforms in healthcare, workers rights, and childcare, and the doom of an imbalanced demographics like we have with the boomers (ESPECIALLY the baby boomers) is that they vote only for their selfish needs and won't vote to invest in the younger generation
So every month the government siphons off 40-45% of your income and donates a lot of it to Big Healthcare. So a case of being damned if you do and damned if you don't...
The downside is only the very roch can afford expensive medical emergencies.
But with insurance individuals get to pull the value of future premium payments forward to pay for large expenses in the present. There’s also a degree of socialization.
The downside is there will always be an overhead.
Government health care is insurance writ large and has the same tradeoffs, just on a larger scale.
I would argue that it has even more tradeoffs; unlike private insurance, it's usually both mandatory and a monopoly, and that can go very wrong very quickly.
The US system is extremely overregulated and preventing true competition, even though US insurance is private, so there aren't really any good data points to compare, though.
We choose to spend that on the military. Basically you can choose guns or butter, we choose guns and empire. Whether that is a “correct” decision is an exercise for the reader.
You could argue for lower defense spending, but there’s a hard lower limit (which is unknown) and if you cross that threshold, the world changes for the worse very quickly.
The rules-based order is underpinned by tanks and planes and nukes. Diplomacy is a layer of abstraction over violence and potential violence.
Medicaid is another almost $1 trillion/year.
Hyperfixation on an idealistic interpretation of real-world dynamics will always be thought-terminating. In the dichotomy of map vs territory, the map is definitionally a cliche. We can be better than that.
- it has a much larger pool of insured, which reduces overall risk, and thus can have lower premiums/taxes
- there is no need for profits, which again lowers costs
- providers only have to deal with a single "insurer", which significantly reduces complexity of getting paid. Patients no longer have to waste time filling out paperwork about their insurance provider, and dealing with misunderstandings and miscommunication about whether they are insured, who they are insured by, etc.
- You no longer have to worry about if your preferred provider is "in network". Which also removes needless beurocracy.
- There is more of an incentive to care about longterm health, because the government will pay for all healthcare over the life of the patient. This used to be the case for private insurance, back when people stayed with the same employer, and same insurance company for most of their life. But now, insurance companies just want to minimize costs while you are with them, which probably won't be that long.
- Employers no longer have to waste time and resources providing health insurance for employees, and employees no longer need to spend time, energy, and anxiety on "open enrollment" every year.
Reason being that it disincentives job creation, by making it more costly to hire in America. Arguably all businesses and people benefit by keeping people alive longer, and therefore the companies which employ more people but make less profits shouldn’t pay more towards that goal. Let giant but very profitable companies with fewer employees pay too.
Large wealth inequality makes GDP per capita and average household spending not representative of a real-world median household. If healthcare costs have outpaced median income but kept up with mean income, that is a MASSIVE societal issue.
Most of the plots and arguments in the article overlook this, so I don't trust the arguments much.
However, it is still interesting how strong the correlations are. It gives some interesting insights into what goes into the cost of running hospitals, I suppose.
> we would be better off if we spent less and focused on lifestyle.
I didn't see any claim opposite of this.
The thing is that in USA (and Canada) radiologist compensation went from 300k/yer to 500k/year over the last 10 yeas. It's the same radiologist. While spending is growing quantity of doctor per population is diminishing.
In USA/Canada there is cartel enforced cap on how many new doctors can be minted per year, and this cap is not even scaling up with the population growth.
But yeah, AMA should stop requiring 8 years of education + 3 years of residency to become a garden-variety doctor. I can look up UpToDate, which most doctors and residents do, to diagnose and treat myself for most common illnesses IF I can purchase medication from pharmacy on my own.
There are a few colleges now offering accelerated 6 year MD degrees so hopefully that option will become more common. A lot of primary care is also being picked up by physician assistants who have less education.
This. The primary purpose of the AMA is to prevent doctors from existing and providing care, all in order to drive up their wealth and status.
Korea has a similar problem right now, their doctors just flexed their power to gain the upper hand economically[1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113082/as-medical-stri...
I live in a country where that exact process is happening right now in real time. It's not pretty. The level of charlatanism and straight up incompetence in this country is off the charts. There are people graduating medical school right now who don't know how to diagnose a heart attack, let alone treat it. And these are the people manning the emergency services. Because wages were driven down, no doctor worth his salt is gonna accept that job. Why work in some shithole hospital when you can be a dermatologist? Emergency services turned into "reassigned to Antartica" tier jobs only failed doctors put up with. I don't even want to think about the number of people who are dying as a result of this.
Nope, in the US we have an extra filter that takes perfectly good med school grads and throws away a large fraction for no good reason other than their bad luck in not getting into a residency program. These are people who passed four years of quite rigorous medical school at great expense, and we effectively ruin their lives (and create artificial health care shortages) by denying them careers arbitrarily. In the US it doesn't matter if you're in the top 1% of the graduating class in the best medical school in the country: if you don't get into a residency program (required before you can be an MD) your medical career is over before it begins.
Even if we did nothing but guarantee a 1-1 relationship between graduates of our medical schools and residency program seats we would have more doctors and would not be watering down our talent pool of doctors one iota.
Speaking purely anecdotally, I can 100% get behind this. I live in a more rural area, work outside regularly, and a large majority of what I eat is either grown locally (without pesticides/herbicides) or I grow it myself. I haven't been to a doctor in 7 or 8 years and am in better shape, and feel better, than I ever have.
Its amazing the difference fresh air, fresh food, and time working in the sun and dirt can make.
I work from home, sit on my ass all day, love to eat processed foods and also haven't been to the doctor in 7+ years but feel great. But I'm (just) under 40.
A lot of stuff doesn't catch up to you until you're older.
It absolutely could make no difference in the long run, though I do know quite a few people in our age group (including siblings) already dealing with an assortment of health issues, regular doc visits, medications, etc.
Though I would find it hard to believe that fresh air, fresh food, and a bit of time working outside each day would make anyone's health worse.
Injuries and trauma care in general are absolutely a different story. While I am less certain about the net positive of many modern treatments that only treat symptoms and ignore root causes, modern trauma care seems to have a massive pile of evidence showing how beneficial it is.
Here's a summary of the key points from the document in 11 bullet points:
• Health spending is primarily determined by income levels, with higher-income countries spending more on healthcare.
• The rising health share of GDP is driven by increasing quantities of healthcare consumed, not primarily by price inflation.
• Technological advancements and intensity of care are major drivers of increased health spending.
• The U.S. health system is not uniquely inefficient; its high spending is consistent with its high income levels.
• Commonly cited utilization indicators do not show that the U.S. uses less healthcare than expected given its spending.
• Physician incomes and hospital profits do not explain the high U.S. health spending.
• The U.S. healthcare workforce has grown significantly, reflecting increased intensity of care rather than just higher wages.
• America's mediocre health outcomes are explained by diminishing returns to healthcare spending and lifestyle factors like obesity.
• Rising healthcare spending does not mean reduced consumption in other areas due to productivity gains in other sectors.
• Price comparisons between countries are often methodologically flawed and do not accurately reflect true healthcare costs.
• The income elasticity of health spending is high, meaning people spend proportionally more on healthcare as they get richer.
One prescription I get is $1.30, another is $85.
My son goes to a specialist and all $395 is paid by insurance, while my wife goes to a different one and we pay $86 out of pocket after a $14 "insurance discount", insurance pays nothing.
They're both in-network. I save my old antibiotics and such because it takes so long to get into urgent care, and it's expensive, and I can't go to my regular doctor for a sinus infection because it takes two weeks to get in.
Thankfully I pay $0 out of my check for Blue Cross since my employer pays for it. I just have co-pays, deductibles, etc
I cringed so much reading this.
* When you're prescribed an antibiotic, you're expected to finish the course of medication. Not doing so leads to resistant strains.
* Medication has an expiration date for a reason. You generally shouldn't expect to be able to save it from one illness to the next, nor to know that the one from before is applicable to the current condition.
* The large majority of disease is caused by viruses, and antibiotics won't help. Your "sinus infection" might not be a local infection at all but just some respiratory illness resulting in sinus congestion. Never mind whether it's viral or bacterial.
There are some hard to discover offerings in healthcare but overall very little differentiation.
Why don’t we have multiple chains of monthly subscription diabetes centers, for instance? If it weren’t for insurance and over-regulation of every aspect of healthcare, we would see market flourishing in the US as there is an over abundance of chronic illness.
I sympathize with the PoV that we want someone else to pay because it’s expensive, but another way to solve that would be to remove all the regulatory capture and industry collusion and predatory middlemen (PBMs I’m talking to you) and let new delivery mechanisms evolve. Let supply adapt to demand.
I'm old enough to remember a time you could break an arm, show up to your primary doctor's office that day without a pre-scheduled appointment, and walk out with a cast on plus pain meds all for less than a week's take-home pay for a blue collar employee. This was largely due in part for the reason you were the one paying the bill and there was almost no overhead. Plus the doctors who charged absurd fees simply lost patients to the competition down the street.
Principal agent problems are rife in modern society, starting with medical care. They basically remove almost all pricing competition from the equation.
Many on HN make more than physicians these days. Doctor pay is not the problem in US healthcare and hasn’t really ever been.
I think ordinary consumers care much less about whether their country spends a nominal share of GDP on the heath sector, than about whether they will be unexpectedly bankrupt by consuming health services, and this is why people are actually mad.
I can provide anecdotal evidence that prices inexplicably high. A primary care physician will charge anywhere between $200-$500 for a visit. If you have good insurance, you don’t pay out of pocket. In the same city, I once had to go to a PCP who would only work without insurance. I had to wait a lot because of how many people were lined up in front of the office, but I paid $50 for the visit. I’m already paying 4-10x in a comprable market for the same services.
When I was abroad, I had to visit a doctor’s office for food poisoning. I paid 200 in the local currency. I could have gone to a hospital and they would charged me 500 in the local currency. But what’s important to know is that the median monthly wages in the country were 25000 in the local currency. So all in all, you’d pay a smaller portion of your wages for a simple checkup.
And that tbh is why people are actually mad.
To take two ER-related examples:
• In the USA, I had some brief, sharp chest pain and my general practitioners office refused to set an appointment without be going to the ER. I was quite certain it was not a heart attack, but I complied. I was briefly triaged and not admitted. I believe the bill (with very good insurance) was more than 2000 USD.
• In Germany, my wife had an eye injury that required a trip to the ER. She was triaged, saw several doctors, including a specialist. She fortunately did not need treatment, but was required to check with another specialist within a few days to check how things were healing. There was no cost for this beyond our public insurance.
I can cite dozens of other examples where medicines were free/cheap, tests or specialists were covered by default, elective procedures were dramatically cheaper, etc. And this doesn't even include several fights with US insurance companies over tests that were recommended by a doctor.
Is the system here perfect? Certainly not, FAR from it. But it is a big reason why I'm not interested in moving back to the US.
I don't normally have to wait unless I turn up at the surgery without an appointment. If the previous appointments run over I sometimes have to wait but rarely ore than half an hour.
Diminishing returns to spending and worse lifestyle factors explain America’s mediocre health outcomes
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
https://costplusdrugs.com/medications/albuterol-90mcg-inhale...
Obesity obviously doesn't cause high drug costs but it is a risk factor for asthma. Non-obese people are less likely to have to spend anything on inhalers.
In 2017 my wife and I were living in Portugal for several months. When we needed to refill her prescriptions, our short-term rental host said, "Go to the ER."
Backstory: we're well familiar with ERs in the U.S. Due to various conditions, we've been to at least a dozen ERs a total of perhaps twenty times. For anyone who doesn't know, unless you are actively dying, visiting the ER in the U.S. is sloooow. The average time to see a doctor, in our experience, is about an hour.
So we replied: "the ER? seriously?"
He assured us it would be fine, so we walked ten minutes to the ER and signed in. We had barely turned in the history paperwork when they called us to go back. No preliminary check-in with the nurse -- straight to the doctor.
She said, "Why did you come to the ER? We could have been busy and you would have had to wait."
We explained how our host had assured us this was the best way to go, and that the ER would take care of us.
The doctor nodded and said, "Sure, I'll sign for the prescriptions, but just remember it might take more time the next time."
We went back to the front desk. Remember, we had no travel insurance, this was full freight. "That will be twenty-eight euro." We happily paid, and walked out the door, prescriptions in hand, less than 30 minutes after we walked in.
Bonus: the cost to buy the prescriptions, again with no insurance, was less than the co-pay in the U.S. with employer-healthcare.
N=2: When my daughter was visiting me in Bangkok, she got a bit of a gastro issue. Same as in Portugal, we had no insurance for her. I took her to Bumrungrad, one of the best hospitals in Thailand. We were in and out in under an hour, including picking up the prescription, and the total cost was under $100.
I'm not trying to rebut the article, just throwing out some details.
This is such a bizarre couple of statements for me. First, I would consider an hour very, very fast. If I show up for an appointment on time, I still don't see the doctor for about an hour.
And for a non-emergency emergency room visit (even a fairly serious one like a broken bone, abscessed tooth, etc) I've had family give up after 8-12 hours of waiting in the lobby without being admitted to see a doctor, often in relatively empty lobbies. (The hospital is hoping for this, I'm sure)
My sister once bailed after 12+ hours, when the doctor's office that instructed her (in no uncertain terms) to take her child in was about to open the next morning.
N=5 (I checked in with my wife about two times she went to the ER in Nepal, and I went to Bumrungrad once in Bangkok), but our average time abroad has been under 30 minutes, and that includes the prescriptions in Portugal and getting eyeglasses in Nepal. Only one time was serious, in Nepal, and they saw her immediately then.
In A&E (UK for "ER") departments I've seen (half a dozen experiences, mostly attending with others, all for non life-threatening conditions) wait times ~an hour, about which staff were apologetic. (I understand those expectations may have changed under Tory sabotage.)
This whole thread, while interesting, highlights how variable N=1 anecdotes can be. We're poorly served when we base conclusions only on our own experience. (Though I still think US-one-hour guy is a fortunate outlier!)
> fortunate outlier
Not exactly how I would describe it :-) I:
- Hit the ER with two collapsed lungs in an ambulance after a motorcycle accident: saw the docs immediately (I assume, I don't remember it)
- Hit the ER with intestinal blockage after the motorcycle accident, had vomited something like fifty times during the night and was actively bringing up bile as we checked in: they saw me in maybe an hour
- Hit the ER with a suspected deep vein thrombosis: I think they knew it wasn't that serious, but still saw me in <30 minutes
- Hit the ER with *actual* deep vein thrombosis: they saw me almost immediately and almost didn't let me leave that day.
With my cat bite I was checking in every half an hour, and then every fifteen minutes, showing them what was going on. Once I got to the back the doctor kinda puffed out his cheeks and said something along the lines of, "yeah, they shouldn't have made you wait." Then they put me on a cocktail of the Super Serious Antibiotics, and every junior doctor on rotation (it seemed like) came by to take a look. (Top tip: you really don't want to be a medical celebrity, even for an evening.) I joke about knowing it was serious only because I'd read so many nineteenth-century novels.
Whoa. That's eye-opening. If country X spends less than country Y, rather than surmise that country X is more efficient with their healthcare spending we might want to look at whether country X has less per-capita income than country Y.
This makes sense, though it's very surprising. I've seen so much commentary here about how much better the Europeans are at dealing with healthcare than us Americans...
We know the US healthcare system is a ripoff exactly because while the spending as a percentage of GDP in the US is dramatically higher, the measurable outcomes are embarrassingly bad across the board.
I think the big drivers of worse American health outcomes are things like obesity, car-based lifestyles, and long working hours, all of which have nothing to do with our healthcare system.
The healthiest countries succeed by rarely needing their healthcare system because people behave in healthy ways. Needing the system a lot means you've already failed.
In addition, yes, I think we can blame obesity on (the lack of) healthcare. If people routinely met with a physician and got advice, they might be able to turn things around before merely being overweight becomes obesity.
We're effectively in a shortage situation, and by design. If you don't get preventative care, that's considered a good thing by the healthcare system because they would honestly collapse if everyone got the recommended doctor visits. So we have people not getting preventative treatment and dying of preventable causes at depressingly high rates. This is generally considered fine, because the health care system is bursting at the seams with more money than it can count, so it's considered successful.
You can name things that are bad about US healthcare and could be improved but that's a different topic than why Americans are in relatively poor health compared to other developed countries.
Infant mortality is a measurable performance indicator for the healthcare system regardless of overall population's longevity.
Not an expert by any means, just confused by the complexity of it all.
Anecdotally, two stories:
- A while back, I had dinner with two friends who do pharma research. At the time they were working on treatment for T2 diabetes. Naive me asked, "Why not just focus on prevention?" They said it's doesn't happen. Too few people are willing to change.
- More recently I had a conversation with a doctor at a social event. A similar topic came up, again I suggest prevention. And again I was told the same, it just doesn't happen.
Humans conform to the norms around them. This was an evolutionary advantage. That is, "Look at them, they're still alive. I'll do that as well."
That's detrimental in modern times. Doc says, "You're overweight. Drop 20 lbs." You might says "yes" and then you leave, walk thru the waiting area, and see everyone is 40+ lbs too heavy. Consciously and sub-consciously you think "Nah. I'm good look at *them*." This is further exasperated by broader cultural norms. Fat shaming might be bad, agreed. But out-of-shapeness has been normalized, championed, and celebrated. There's also a lack of transparency (read: honesty). The extra weight is said to be perfectly fine. It's not. It comes with plenty of implications and complications.
A great positive example of socialized behavior is smoking. It was marginalized and slowly became less and less "popular". In theory that could work with "fitness" but suggesting obesity is bad will get you canceled. There's no socially acceptable way to stop the cycle. And Big Pharma is happy for this.
P.s. Kudos for teaching your children well. Sadly, you're the minority.
The System is only as healthy as the population it serves. In the USA demand is high, price naturally follows. Reduce demand, prices will fall.
This link just happened to be what I found. I'm certain I've seen others.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
Those aren't great metrics as they are highly confounded by other factors that have nothing to do with a healthcare system.
Healthcare services have inelastic demand. If you have a broken leg, and the average income is $X or $2X, clearly the hospital can charge twice as much in the second case and still mend legs.
What is surprising is the third section:
> The rising health share explained by rising quantities per capita (not prices!)
I don't think the author really makes the point, however.
They don't seem to claim that higher income people are getting more doctor's visits or more procedures done or taking more medicine (though this may all be true).
Rather, they claim that the we are putting more resources into healthcare, a somewhat orthogonal claim.
One told me the insurance companies incentivize him to treat patients like an assembly line where cash only lets him spend one on one time with customers. He also might treat people for several things on the same bill which he claimed he’d have to itemize and charge separately for with insurance.
So, do people here have specific examples (esp links) to support or refute those anecdotes? If they were true, it would mean insurance rules were driving much of the cost. Looking at their causes, my first guess would be how they respond to losses from both real malpractice and greed-driven lawsuits. I can’t imagine that costs aren’t impacted by this with all the lawyer ads I see for suing insurance companies. ;)
I think the author made the right choice to leave these lumped together. It would be interesting to see how these costs confound over time but would make this article even longer.
If U.S. Americans did not have an irrational verve for education as the supposed panacea of democracy, there would be no public education system. If they did not believe the intense pseudoscience of the medical industry, they would not care about health insurance.
But as they are under the sway of such false conscience, the system of gradual decline called inflation pays for unqualified people to keep a livelihood at the expense of a misled and deluded public. That expense is not only the costs of running these systems but their detriments to the health and education they pretend to treat.
The increased spending on healthcare is no different than spending more on education or the "homeless problem", it is simply a politics of shifting more funds into systems that are legally obligated to pay high sums for a lot of nothing. It only appears different than education because we pretend its not completely wrapped up in public spending and politics like education is. Obama made sure that healthcare would hold such a place as education in the system with the reforms to healthcare, and the people applauded this.
High incomes paying more for healthcare is simply those who can afford it using the system that ultimately pays for the health and education of the rich at the expense of the health and education of the poor. After all we know that nobody who is rich is paying any of their healthcare bills, they have excellent health insurance for that.