Americans spend more on health care and get less - report

Obama care was never meant to fix things, it was intended to position everyone to depend on the government to provide healthcare. End of story.

That's because the cost of services are so high. Healthcare can never be affordable when the cost are where they are.

Stats are like bikinis. What they reveal is interesting. What they HIDE is vital!



1) Does "spending" include any tax money, too?

2) Is the higher admin cost due to legal (lawsuit) / regulatory / insurance filing?

3)

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The USA also has higher infant mortality rates.

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This impact "life expectancy". What is the cause of this higher infant mortality? Does our "freedoms" mean that mothers aren't 'forced' to take part in prenatal care? Is it a educational issue?

Life expectancy has much more to do with personal habits

Leviathan is expensive.

The cost of health care is so high because the demand for health care is so high.

News flash for people who haven’t realized: we’re a really, really fat nation. Just so fat. Fatty fat fats. Lot’s of fat.

We start eating healthier and health care costs will fall. Short of that, we’ll continue having the most expensive health care in the modern world, regardless of government policies

From the same researcher who wrote the referenced JAMA paper...

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“We know we spend a lot more than everyone else, and we have looked for easy explanations — things like greed in the system, fee-for-service medicine, overutilization,” he said. But the research, he said, didn’t match his expectations. “I’ve been looking at other countries and seeing there’s a lot of fee-for-service in other countries, and other countries are struggling with overutilization.”

When it came to many of the measures of health system function, the United States was in the middle of the pack, not an outlier, as Dr. Jha had expected. Many analysts have called for the country to shift its physician training away from specialty care and toward more primary care medicine, for example. But the study found that 43 percent of U.S. doctors practice primary care medicine, about typical for the group.

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Bruce Landon, a professor of policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School, said that the complaints about rising health care costs are a worldwide issue. Even though other countries spend less than the United States, few believe they have found a way to tame spending forever.


“I don’t think there’s any of these countries where if you went and talked to them individually, they wouldn’t say they’re having a health care cost crisis,” he said. “They’re all struggling with paying for new technology and the cost of the system.”

The data did not suggest that any country had a plug-and-play policy template for devising a lower-cost, high-performing system. The systems tended to perform better than the United States on some measures and worse on others, with lots of idiosyncrasies.

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There were two areas where the United States really was quite different: We pay substantially higher prices for medical services, including hospitalization, doctors’ visits and prescription drugs. And our complex payment system causes us to spend far more on administrative costs. The United States also has a higher rate of poverty and more obesity than any of the other countries, possible contributors to lower life expectancy that may not be explained by differences in health care delivery systems.

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We also subsidize prescription drug and medical services R&D for the entire world.

It’s not the biggest reason why our costs are outrageous, but it certainly plays into it

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All this spending hasn't translated into better health for Americans

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This, of course, is bullshite. Americans are less healthy, NOT because of the healthcare system, but because we are fat, overeating slobs who don't move much.

If there is a healthcare system prescription for that, sign me up.