ManusJustus said:
Both of those statements dont make sense to me. First of all, the UK can increase how much it spends on healthcare, and the result would be more quality. Secondly, you have no basis for why it would cost more in the US when all the evidence suggests otherwise. Happy Squirrel, America does have the best quality system, the problem is that we aren't getting enough bang for our buck. We have a 66% cancer rate and countries that pay half as much as we do have a 50% chance, so obviously that would increase if other countries matched America's spending. Of course, numerousfactors (including the fact that American culture promotes obesity) go into healthcare costs, and since countries are so different from one another you can only make weak comparisons about the big picture. |
I could be wrong but that if you looked deeper into the cancer survival rates I think you would find quite a few things which explain why American Healthcare is so expensive.
I wouldn't be suprised to find that people in the Scandanavian countries tended to be much more proactive about their health, and as a result more cancers were found at an earlier stage leading to highly effective inexpensive treatment. In contrast, I wouldn't be that surprised to see that the US and most non-Scandanavian countries had similar levels of cancers being found late stage and the only country in the world where these patients have a high survival rate is the United States because they have access to the amazingly expensive treatments. Suppose that the 22% of male patients that survived in the United States and not in England was because they had access to treatments which increased the total cost to treat their cancer by $250,000 over the English system, doesn't that explain a lot of the reason why the American system is so much more expensive?
But this goes back to the argument I keep making and no-one seems to listen to ...
When you look at the statistics and analysis of the rise in healthcare costs from the beggining of the previous century to today, the primary driving factor for increased costs in the system has been the development of new technology which allows us to treat more people and provide better results. The unfortunate problem is that this translates into more people being treated, they're being treated more often, and the average cost of a single treatment is increasing. What this means is that the increases in multiple areas are creating an exponential growth in the cost of the system per user.
Now, this cost increase directly translates into an increase in the cost of a private system and as limitations in service in a public system; and as a result more and more people in both systems don't have access to the healthcare they need. By simply talking to Canadians and doctors from Northern states you can see that a lot of Canadians have traveled to the United States to pay out of their pocket for a procedure rather than wait on long lists or because they can't get the treatment in Canada; and in countries like India there is a booming business of creating surgical clinics which cater to Canadian clients.
Being that preventable illnesses and overhead represents the vast majority of the healthcare cost the only way to manage the cost of healthcare without impacting outcomes is to reduce the number of people who are sick, and to catch illnesses at an earlier stage when they cost (far) less to treat. Even though I have seen debates on what to do about healthcare hundreds of times over the past decades I have never seen anyone debate how to reduce healthcare costs, only people who argue about who should pay it.
