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> The US spends more on healthcare per capita than any other country ... ...because it's very inefficient

barry-cotter 7y ago
You have the causality reversed. The US spends money on marginal improvements in healthcare that other countries judge not worthwhile. The US is so rich that they focus on quality and convenience when other countries are trying to cut costs. The US system really is very inefficient. All that excess capacity makes it relatively robust to surges in demand, like for ICU beds now due to COVID. IIRC the US has 70% average occupancy compared to the UK NHS’s 85%. Waiting times to see a doctor are also much shorter in the US than in Canada. The US is richer so it can afford to value other things over efficiency.
- andrepd 7y ago
  Well that's complete bullshit, I'm sorry to say. The health care system in the US is by nearly any conceivable metric worse than most developed countries, some of them with a fraction of its healthcare spending. Such indicators include life expectancy, infant mortality, cost for the same procedures, number of bankruptcies due to medical costs per year, number of uninsured people, availability of expensive/experimental treatment... Healthcare in the US is expensive because of reasons such as: identical medicine/equipment/procedures costing many times more in the US than to e.g. the NHS, because administrative costs made up 34% of total healthcare (pause a minute to consider how ludicrous this situation is), absolutely not because it is higher quality. The idea that "the US is so rich that they focus on quality and convenience when other countries are trying to cut costs" is so ludicrous that to believe so requires a real detachment from the daily issues people face. Tens of millions of people are uninsured, tens of millions more are one broken leg away from having their savings wiped. How can anybody then say "they are so good they can afford to splurge"?

You have the causality reversed. The US spends money on marginal improvements in healthcare that other countries judge not worthwhile. The US is so rich that they focus on quality and convenience when other countries are trying to cut costs. The US system really is very inefficient. All that excess capacity makes it relatively robust to surges in demand, like for ICU beds now due to COVID. IIRC the US has 70% average occupancy compared to the UK NHS’s 85%. Waiting times to see a doctor are also much shorter in the US than in Canada. The US is richer so it can afford to value other things over efficiency.

andrepd 7y ago
Well that's complete bullshit, I'm sorry to say. The health care system in the US is by nearly any conceivable metric worse than most developed countries, some of them with a fraction of its healthcare spending. Such indicators include life expectancy, infant mortality, cost for the same procedures, number of bankruptcies due to medical costs per year, number of uninsured people, availability of expensive/experimental treatment... Healthcare in the US is expensive because of reasons such as: identical medicine/equipment/procedures costing many times more in the US than to e.g. the NHS, because administrative costs made up 34% of total healthcare (pause a minute to consider how ludicrous this situation is), absolutely not because it is higher quality. The idea that "the US is so rich that they focus on quality and convenience when other countries are trying to cut costs" is so ludicrous that to believe so requires a real detachment from the daily issues people face. Tens of millions of people are uninsured, tens of millions more are one broken leg away from having their savings wiped. How can anybody then say "they are so good they can afford to splurge"?