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Big agree with this. Also there's no all-encompassing definition of 'healthcare' that will cover all categories, the way there is for groceries or cars or serve

Big agree with this. Also there's no all-encompassing definition of 'healthcare' that will cover all categories, the way there is for groceries or cars or servers. As people get more disposable income to spend, they'll gravitate towards what is not so much medicine as improving their bodies (speaking as an older athlete who's spent significant money to repair shoulder, hip injuries & stay relatively young- my grandparent's generation would've said 'your shoulder's done, you're not young anymore, it's over', etc.) And then also end of life care- some amazing % of our healthcare costs go into the last 6 months of life, which is all totally optional care and we don't 'have' to have- but we want to because we have the disposable cash for it. We want the $27,000 cancer drug or the $100k for an extra two weeks of life on the backend

iguy 7y ago
Right, this difference of scale is enormous. Back when hospitals couldn't do that much, and were not far from being hotels with better hygiene & worse food, then how to pay for them wasn't such a hard problem. But now US healthcare is 17% of GDP (if I recall correctly) and this proportion rises with GPD, unsurprisingly, as more other needs are already met. It isn't going to go down. Pensions are in a way similar. When steelworkers retiring at 65 could expect on average a few golden years, then deciding how to pay for that wasn't such a huge deal. When they can expect a third of their lifetime to be in retirement, then it's very different.
- andruby 7y ago
  You say it won't come down, but that's because the US is in it's own ballgame. In most other advanced western country healthcare "only" accounts for 7~11% of GDP. The chart on [0] is incredible. I also shows how much that percentage has grown over the last 45 years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... [1] Source data OECD: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA
  - iguy 6y ago
    I agree it's higher, and while some of this is waste, some of the higher proportion is explained by the US being richer. Whether it will come down, I guess that's partly a forecasting guess. Will the healthcare sector be a smaller part of the economy in 10, 20 years? Employ fewer people? I would be extremely surprised if this happened in any advanced country.

iguy 7y ago

Right, this difference of scale is enormous. Back when hospitals couldn't do that much, and were not far from being hotels with better hygiene & worse food, then how to pay for them wasn't such a hard problem. But now US healthcare is 17% of GDP (if I recall correctly) and this proportion rises with GPD, unsurprisingly, as more other needs are already met. It isn't going to go down. Pensions are in a way similar. When steelworkers retiring at 65 could expect on average a few golden years, then deciding how to pay for that wasn't such a huge deal. When they can expect a third of their lifetime to be in retirement, then it's very different.

andruby 7y ago
You say it won't come down, but that's because the US is in it's own ballgame. In most other advanced western country healthcare "only" accounts for 7~11% of GDP. The chart on [0] is incredible. I also shows how much that percentage has grown over the last 45 years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... [1] Source data OECD: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA
- iguy 6y ago
  I agree it's higher, and while some of this is waste, some of the higher proportion is explained by the US being richer. Whether it will come down, I guess that's partly a forecasting guess. Will the healthcare sector be a smaller part of the economy in 10, 20 years? Employ fewer people? I would be extremely surprised if this happened in any advanced country.