[quote=Eugene][quote=davelj]
That’s a good point and certainly accounts for perhaps a couple of percentage points in the differential, but… not the whole 10 percentage points. No, clearly we have multiple US-specific problems with our delivery system.[/quote]
More than a couple of points. Most of the medical expenses accumulate during the last few years of life. Probably enough to account for the gap between Mexico and Europe.
We do have multiple US-specific problems, but solving them will not reduce real cost of treatment by more than 20-40%.
[/quote]
Your Mexico-Europe gap rationale is a reasonable possibility (I’m not an expert). However, as it appears that US health care spending will be over 17% of GDP this year (http://www.kff.org/insurance/upload/7692_02.pdf), while the average in Europe is around 10% (with higher life expectancies), it’s clear that our system is broken. If we operated an identical system, then by definition we’d see a reduction in real spending of roughly 40%. That seems like real money to me. I’m generally in favor of free market solutions to economic problems – I have libertarian leanings – but… our health care system appears to be a textbook case of market failure.
The following post does a good job of covering this (in my view, anyway):
“The bottom line is that, when it comes to health care, all the market is really capable of doing is providing reasonably affordable care to the young and healthy, people for whom the risk profile is essentially random and therefore the economic model more closely resembles that of other major types of insurance (car, home, life). But a system that only covers the young and the healthy is, by definition, a failure. That’s why every other industrialized country has long since adopted some sort of government insurance system. Expecting the market to provide affordable health care to all is like expecting the market to provide everyone with an affordable personal chef. It’s never gonna happen.”
