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Is there any medical procedure/medicine for which the US is not the most expensive nation (or among the most expensive)?
by hiyer 9y ago
Is there any medical procedure/medicine for which the US is not the most expensive nation (or among the most expensive)?
- Consultant32452 9y agoYes, my local grocery chain gives away a large number of medications including antibiotics and some heart meds free, not even paid for by taxes. The drugs are so cheap on the free market that they make it up by people just buying groceries there.
- GordonS 9y agoWow, are antibiotics not controlled in the US? Here in the UK you can only obtain them with a prescription, and I just assumed most/every developed nation would be the same.
- alkonaut 9y agoI hope the grandparent post meant they are prescribed but not charged for. Not that you can buy antibiotics over the counter.
- Consultant32452 9y agoYes, you have to have a prescription. It's just free as in $0.
- phil21 9y agoJust lasik and plastic surgery
- BaronVonSteuben 9y agoCoincidentally things that insurance isn't involved in ...
- wwweston 9y agoAdditionally: they're optional procedures, ones for which there are often long-accepted reasonable substitutions, and you can take your time researching and comparison shopping. Given those conditions, you could reasonably expect a market of competing private providers to do pretty well at yielding reasonable prices for effective services. (Absent those conditions -- anywhere that care and treatment are oriented around alleviating illness and suffering with any kind of immediate debilitating effects or urgency, really -- you might well expect that a market of competing private providers doesn't yield the same effects.)
- Consultant32452 9y agoIn other words you could expect the market to improve virtually all medical care. The "urgent" stuff you describe where a person could not temporarily postpone our shop around is in the vast minority.
- c256 9y agoI’m curious why you think this. When last I looked, a very large percentage of medical care was urgent care; in several demographics, it was a large majority. There are a variety of ways of measuring ‘how much’ medical care is given, which has a big impact on how things compare. Cost per capital, for example, is a fairly intuitive measurement and it skews heavily towards urgent care.
- Consultant32452 9y agoThe study cited in this article suggests emergency care accounts for just 2% of all healthcare costs. There's some other ways it could be calculated, but it's definitely not getting out of the single digits. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/28/nick-gillespie/does-emergency-care-account-just-2-percent-all-hea/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/...
- morogop 9y ago
- BaronVonSteuben 9y agoDoesn't seem like a very good comparison considering it's "free" in most other countries.
- randyrand 9y agoIt'd still be worthwhile to know how much the government pays in costs in those countries.
- isostatic 9y agoThe US as a whole pays about 3 times as much per person than most Western European countries, and over twice as much as the most expenesive ones.
- kthejoker2 9y agoWhat? We don't even pay twice as much as most countries, although our cost curve is rising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
- randyrand 9y agoGreat source. I enjoyed looking at that. Socialized health care is not the silver bullet in terms of cost reduction. No shock there though...
- hiyer 9y agoIndia has free, government-run hospitals but they're few and far between, so most people prefer the private ones. In a private, for-profit hospital, an uncomplicated Caesarean section with around a week's stay for mom and baby would cost ~ $1500, out of which insurance would cover ~ $900. According to the article, this would cost ~$51k in the US, so even non-free services are much cheaper outside the US. As an aside, Indian private hospitals are far from altruistic when it comes to cost, as recent incidents[1] have shown. 1. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/fortis-dengue-death-case-haryana-government-orders-probe/articleshow/61741210.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/fortis-dengue-deat...