Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Cost and Effectiveness of U.S. Medicine vs Other Countries

There are, indeed, many things the US does better than other countries in the medical field. Much of the true difference in cost is the ancillary field.
We pay more for hospital care because if tighter regulation and higher costs.

We probably train far more physicians than other countries but I have no data to back that up. Despite federal subsidies and low pay, resident care is done at a loss.

We pay far more for drugs because we subsidize the pharmaceutical research to the benefit of the rest of the world.

We have a lot of duplicate administrative services between all the various insurance companies.

We have WAYYY more MRI, CT PET and other machines than other countries because we have a fee for service based system. So yes, you can get MRIs much more quickly and efficiently. When they are under integrated managed care (say Kaiser) I suspect they have much lower access to imaging than the rest of the US population.

We have led the world in medicine research and codification of outcomes improvement. This has benefited the entire world. We have paid the price.

My point in bringing up the disparities in medical spending are to show that you can reach a medium where we provide perhaps 30-40% more care (universal coverage and complete coverage for those not completely covered now) without it being more expensive to the population as a whole. There will have to be sacrifices but they should not have to come from the medical community as it is more controlled than other sectors of the health care cost. We can show the world that better care is possible under constrained budgets.