Speaking of spending more and not getting more, Mark Thoma points to this Wall Street Journal article discussing health care spending as a percentage of GDP in the 34 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Rare is the graph that speaks this clearly. Health care spending has gone up all over, but in the United States, we are spending over a sixth of our wealth on health care. No one else in the industrialized world pours that much money into health care... and our exorbitant spending is not producing proportionally remarkable health advantages (always fun when the Wall Street Journal agrees with me).
What's gone wrong here? We're Americans. We're good capitalists, hard bargainers, yet we're dumping our money into a health care bamboozle that no one else in the world falls for.
What going on here? A good question for sure. Here is what it looks like to me. There are two special interest groups that reap massive profits from all of this. The insurance industry for one, including all of its sales personnel (Hello Mike Rounds). They have kicked in millions upon millions to keep the status quo by duping the public. The other industry is the health industry itself. It keeps layers and layers of staff to do the bidding of the insurance industry with billing and denying and all sorts of things that cost a lot of moolah and do not deliver one drop of healthcare. Now, to add further expense, both industries have a huge lobby that sucks even more marrow from our bones to pay the republicans to kill the law. The republicans have had 38 votes at about 1 and half million per vote to do the bidding of the lobbyists and on we go. I think we shall hit 40 before this starts the first of October.
Republicans are now declaring that they will shut the government down to get the lobbyists way to keep the status quo for both industries. They do not care if the world burns and takes America with it as long as dudes like Mike Rounds and the rest of the con men continue to get their blood money.
Most folks by now agree that the system is not working and does not work the way it is. They are ready for the change to start saving hard earned money. America needs to cut out the middlemen and start doing the work of taking care of our citizens medical needs. Docs and hospitals, need to do the business of healthcare and not negotiating with an insurance company about the way a heart procedure should be done, that will cut costs and you will see the chart go to a boring flat line of costs, just like in the real world.
The current system allocates "scarce" health resources by increasing price. Check shortage of Doxycycline.