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"The history of health care spending in the US is consistent with the hypothesis that we view health care as a luxury good, one on which we spend more of our we
by zwieback 15y ago
"The history of health care spending in the US is consistent with the hypothesis that we view health care as a luxury good, one on which we spend more of our wealth as that wealth grows."
Not sure I agree with the wording here. You could just as easily say that increasing wealth leads to increasing life expectancy and increased obesity which leads to higher expenditures. I certainly don't view healthcare as a luxury good on which I chose to spend more.
- TomOfTTB 15y agoBut I think the definition you point to is part of the problem. By saying "Luxury" it makes it sound like staying alive 20 extra years is the same thing as buying a BMW and people tend to reject that. But from a purely analytic standpoint the two situations are similar. A luxury is something of value that most people don't have because it is cost prohibitive. Well most people outside the western world don't live as long as we do and aren't as obese as we are. Because they don't have the money to pay for the health care that we do. So in the limited confines of the study I think their assessment is accurate. With the caveat being their study was very limited in that it doesn't address individual acts that would surely bring health care costs down (as an example negotiating on a national level for drugs is sure to brings costs down though it might have other disadvantages)