4 ms·
US healthcare professionals at the top of the pile make 3-4x as much as equivalent posts in the EU IIRC. A huge amount is going in salary costs. Another huge c
by pja 5y ago
US healthcare professionals at the top of the pile make 3-4x as much as equivalent posts in the EU IIRC. A huge amount is going in salary costs.
Another huge chunk is spent on the bureaucracy of administrating the payments system, with patients, hosptials, insurers and general practicioner offices all fighting over payments. This is a deadweight cost that other systems don’t have to carry.
Drug costs in the US are much higher than elsewhere, as (I understand it) medicare & medicaid are prevented from negotiating the prices they pay the in way national healthcare systems do in the EU & a myriad set of obfuscatory tactics are used by drug companies to maintain much higher prices that are achievable elsewhere.
& probably lots of other little things too. But those are the big three I think.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoIt's pretty futile to point out the one factor that makes US health care so expensive. The whole system is highly corrupt and obfuscated and allows doctors, administrators, investors, construction companies, insurances, pharma companies and multiple middlemen to make outrageous money. I am not sure how to fix this but an important first step would be to mandate full transparency of all pricing. In addition the same service should cost the same for uninsured and insured patients. Same for in- and out-of-network billing. Right now a patient basically has no way of navigating this. Even if you are insured there is a much greater than zero probability that you will get hit with some random charges you could not have anticipated. You just have to hope for the best when you go to a hospital.