Health care

[libertango]

Paul Krugman has an informative piece on health care today.

Here's the money quote, especially for small-l libertarians, although he doesn't drive it home:

"Above all, a large part of America's health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada."

Translation: Even though Canada has a government run, "single-payer" system, the "private-sector" US spends more on bureauracy, dollar for dollar!

Krugman also makes clear our "private-sector" system isn't that private:

"In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else."

Again: We spend more government dollars per person than either Canada or France.

No wonder there's been such resistance to "socialized medicine" in the US by the health care infrastructure: Turns out it would cut governmment subsidies too much.

Piggies at the trough.

Comments

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

I suspect, but don't know, that a major chunk of the per-capita spending difference is due to the difference in drug prices. The Canadian government uses its buying power to negotiate prices down; the US government essentially allows PHARMA to name its price. Note that the drug companies are happy to sell to the Canadian system even at the lower price; they aren't losing money on those sales.

To play devil's advocate, though, higher US expenditures purchase a system with greater capacity than the publicly-financed systems of Canada and Western Europe. In a sense, the issue of that capacity's method of allocation is independent of the means by which it's funded. The wait times opponents of US public healthcare love to highlight could possibly be solved if per-capita spending rose to US levels.