Bread is too expensive. Clearly we should cut the pay of bakers.
Meaningless.
Bread is too expensive. Clearly we should cut the pay of bakers.
As a Canadian i'll never understand why America tolerates such an outrageous health care system..
What's meaningless is holding out doctors as being paid too much. They are getting paid exactly what the market will bear, just like everyone else. Next you decide some other "Big Fish" need to be skewered. Look to treat the cause, not the symptom, grasshopper.Meaningless.
Let's not also discount wait times for elective surgeries. The United States is among the lowest and I don't think it's a stretch to say that those with private insurance will wait less and pay more. By increasing wait times to that of Canada's, we could significantly reduce costs due to staffing and facility expense.
What's meaningless is holding out doctors as being paid too much. They are getting paid exactly what the market will bear, just like everyone else. Look for the cause not the symptom, grasshopper.
Uh, no.The free market doesn't apply to health care. You've written that yourself, right?
Uh, no.
No, surely not. But I do think doctors are getting paid according to the distorted market principles now in effect. Addressing those distortions is (IMO) a more productive approach than calling doctors out as overpaid.Do you believe that the free market is working as intended for health care in the US at the current time?
No, surely not. But I do think doctors are getting paid according to the distorted market principles now in effect. Addressing those distortions is (IMO) a more productive approach than calling doctors out as overpaid.
Really? It's pretty easy to find evidence to the contrary online, though you chose the worst case Canada instead of looking at all 30 OECD countries with lower cost and better outcomes.Let's not also discount wait times for elective surgeries. The United States is among the lowest and I don't think it's a stretch to say that those with private insurance will wait less and pay more. By increasing wait times to that of Canada's, we could significantly reduce costs due to staffing and facility expense.
Gatordoc50 was talking about wait times for elective surgery as opposed to the percentage of people waiting 6 days or longer to see the doc when sick. Although it's an interesting graph. That data might be different.
Midpack said:Really? It's pretty easy to find evidence to the contrary online, though you chose the worst case Canada instead of looking at all 30 OECD countries with lower cost and better outcomes.
This shows otherwise (wait times are often misused by opponents of universal health care in the US, mostly an out of date argument). For example the UK used to have long wait times from what I've read, but they've improved dramatically it seems...
It's similar.
Improving elective surgery wait times would NOT be a reason for change. I'm not saying there aren't other reasons, just that wait time for elective surgery isn't one of them.
Right but no one claimed that going to universal care would shorten waiting periods. It's obvious from your graph, though, that doing so doesn't have to mean longer waiting times.
+1. Seems to me wait times for elective procedures would be more flexible, and our wait times for sick people are already longer than many/most countries...that was my point.Improving elective surgery wait times would NOT be a reason for us to change. I'm not saying there aren't other reasons, just that wait time for elective surgery isn't one of them.
eridanus said:I don't doubt it but read the Bloomberg article above.
"Last year, a routine visit to a U.S. doctor cost commercial insurers $89 on average, compared with $64 in Switzerland, $40 in Germany and $23 in France."
That's per visit. American doctors simply make more. Period.
"No other developed country pays doctors this much. In 2004, general practitioners in the U.S. were estimated to earn double -- measured by purchasing power -- the median for 21 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; for specialists, the difference was almost threefold."
âItâs the Prices Stupidâ--Why Americans Pay More for Health Care - 2005 - Stories - News - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
"OC&PA: What would it take to fix the problem?
GA: In the United States, every individual physician or hospital is negotiating the prices for health care services with insurance companies. In other countries, one agency, not necessarily a government agency, negotiates and sets the cost for all of the public and private health insurers. That gives them a much stronger negotiating entity to make deals with physicians and hospitals."
But maybe we should go after the Big Fish first.
Do American doctors get paid too much? - Slate Magazine
"But none of this really matters, because doctors' salaries aren't a large enough chunk of health care spending in the United States to make a difference. According to Reinhardt, doctors' net take-home pay (that is, income minus expenses) amounts to only about 10 percent of overall health care spending. * So if you cut that by 10 percent in the name of cost savings, you'd only save about $26 billion. That's a drop in the ocean compared with overhead for insurance companies, billing expenses for doctors' offices, and advertising for drug companies. The real savings in health care will come from these expenses."
Harvard study estimated at least 1/4 of total spending on health care was for administration overhead, specifically dealing with insurance claims.
The coding system wasn't standardized so there had to be specialists and doctors had to employ people just to deal with the insurance. Or spend a lot of their own time handling it.
I think one of the main points of the Brill article is that the free market is currently at work in the drug, medical device, and to a certain extent hospital/medical group sectors. Relatively unregulated, it has led to near-monopoly conditions and price fixing (okay, very uncompetitive pricing) so far. I agree with you that in principle that free market forces should theoretically make an economic system efficient. But free market forces also led to the Standard Oil monopoly, thalidimide babies, and Love Canal. Like eridanus says, the devil is in the details!samclem said:When we apply market principles in this way to buy health care in advance (not, as I said earlier, comparison shopping for an MRI when you are bleeding), then the emphasis will be where it needs to be and costs will be bounded by supply and demand. No need for top down cost controls (which always result in artificial scarcity). No need for the very wasteful single-payer fee-for-service model (Medicare, etc).