We get too little for our health care dollar: Is this a myth?

Looking at some of the reasons why this may be so:

All this led researchers in the American Journal of Public Health to conclude: “The usefulness of crude infant mortality rates in international comparisons is questionable because of differences in the registration of births and deaths.”
The claim that the U.S. fares far worse than other countries on life expectancy suffers a similar problem because it fails to take into account the multitude of factors other than health care that affect life expectancy.
The simple fact is the U.S. suffers from lots of problems “” more drug abuse, more murders, more traffic fatalities “” that cut into overall life expectancy. The murder rate, for example, is seven times higher in the U.S. than in Japan.
Of course, it’s true that some portion of our health care dollars is wasted, and that we spend too much on paperwork. But the fixes to these do not involve more government involvement in health care, as Sens. Kennedy and Clinton would have it.

Comments

DDx:dx
Quite telling which journal this is from, “Investing”, because that is the area of greatest return. Health care is a huge market, business, and why not drive the economy with clean, high paying jobs,,,etc. etc.
The fundamental question is, what do you want for YOUR dollar. Just like I want fast internet and a good economy car, let the market choose. But we do not currently have a free market in healthcare. Over 50% of the dollars are Govmnt. Medicare pricing drives the costs. I could list all the reasons why this is not a market…but some of you conservatives are so afraid of change(That’s the definition of conservative, not wanting things to change) that we are going to be saddled with this 900 lb gorilla.
So “Investing” Magazine now has an interest in infant mortality rates.Yeah, right. They sense the golden goose getting gored.
Should the Medical Industrial Complex be a source for profit?
Is that the goal of health care that some one Profits on the treatment of pain, suffering?
It sure is now. And “Investing”, NYSE, and my IRA are all invested in these returns.
I just wonder if the “profit” posted by HCA is really another Enron on an industry wide scale waiting to hit.
For that is the true question. Is this profit posted by healthcare business a real reflection of improved quality of life, efficiency, Quality?
Me thinks the proteststions of “Investor” make her sound a bit nervous.
Anonymous
The bottom-line is that the use of infant mortality and life expectancy data by the single payer cheerleaders to bolster their claim that we should all enslave ourselves into a 100% government run healthcare nightmare is absurd at best..
Anonymous
Or the simplest and most obvious 2/3 or Americans are obese. Have you see our portions compared to europeans? You can’t make chicken soup out of chicken poop no matter how much you spend.
Morris Berg
I agree with the authors. There are so many other more useful ways to determine whether we are getting too little for our healthcare dollar.
Autopsy studies reveal misdiagnosis in 40% of all terminal patients (1/3 of which could have prevented death if corrected) . . . an error rate that has not improved since 1938.
“Medicine” causes 5-10x as many deaths unnecessary/preventable deaths each year as does lack of health insurance.
IOM (2004): 18,000 unnecessary deaths are attributable to lack of health coverage every year.
IOM (1999): medical errors caused up to 98,000 deaths annually and should be considered a national epidemic.
HealthGrades (2004): using same criteria as IOM (AHRQ data): An average of 195,000 people in the U.S. died due to potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002.
Vioxx . . . ugh . . .
Anonymous
We also spend way too much money overpaying the oligopolists that serve as gate keepers.
Morris Berg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/13/AR2007021301149_pf.html
“Let’s start with one the American Medical Association hopes no one will notice, which is that American doctors make a lot more money than doctors elsewhere — roughly twice as much. The average incomes of $274,000 for specialists and $173,000 for general practitioners are, respectively, 6.6 and 4.2 times those of the average patient. The rate in the other countries is 4 and 3.2.
According to McKinsey, the difference works out to $58 billion a year. What drives it is not how much doctors charge per procedure, but how many procedures they perform and how many patients they see — a volume of business 60 percent higher here than elsewhere.
Included in the income figures is $8 billion physicians earn as investors in diagnostic labs and outpatient surgical clinics. The good news is that those private facilities charge 20 to 30 percent less than hospitals for what they do. But McKinsey found that they don’t save the system any money because the doctors who invest in them wind up ordering more tests and surgeries than doctors who don’t — in the case of tests, two to eight times more.
What we have here is pretty good circumstantial evidence of Pearlstein’s First Law of Health Economics, which holds that if you pay doctors on the basis of how many procedures they do, and you leave it to doctors and their insured patients to decide how much health care they get, consumption of health services will rise to whatever level is necessary for doctors to earn as much as the lawyers who sue them.
Don’t be distracted by arguments that American doctors need to make more because they have to pay $20 billion a year in malpractice insurance premiums forced on them by a hostile legal system, or an equal amount for all the paperwork required by our private insurance system. The $58 billion in what the study defines as excess physician income is calculated after those expenses are paid.
And McKinsey gives the back of its hand to the argument that American doctors deserve to earn more because of all the loans they take out while going through medical school and residency. Comparing median lifetime annual salary to median educational debt at graduation, McKinsey found that doctors do better than those in other professions requiring advanced degrees.
While higher volume is the story behind higher physician costs in the United States, the culprit for spending on hospitals and drugs is higher prices.”
“Single Payer Cheerleader”????
Um NO!Post columnist, discussing:
McKinsey & Company: Accounting for the Cost of Health Care in the United States
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/healthcare/accounting_cost_healthcare.asp
Morris Berg
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/healthcare/accounting_cost_healthcare.asp
Anonymous
Ah McKinsey, one of those crunchy supposedly non-partisan economic think tanks. Unfortunately their cover was blown wide open when they hired Chelsea Clinton.
“American doctors make a lot more money than doctors elsewhere”
I love how they dodge and weave here. Once again they are comparing apples to oranges. Do American doctors make more money than doctors in the UK for instance? Surprisingly, something McKinsey does not want you to know, is that in fact GPs in the UK are now making nearly $200k per year! The GPs there have figured out how to beat the NHS administrators at their own game. Sadly, the NHS is imploding.
“Included in the income figures is $8 billion physicians earn as investors in diagnostic labs and outpatient surgical clinics. The good news is that those private facilities charge 20 to 30 percent less than hospitals for what they do…”
More smoke and mirrors. The CMS has looked at this extensively and has not found this to be the case. In fact, the CMS and private insurers are moving things out of the hospitals because it is significantly cheaper.
“Single Payer Cheerleader”????
YES YOU ARE! You, McKinsey, Chelsea, and Hillary are all single payer cheerleaders…
Morris Berg
A few points Messr anonymous, but first a question:
Did you actually read the report because I suspect not (I know . . . they hired a Clinton so their cover is “blown” and we can just ignore all those pages with numbers and words)?
Oh and seeing as you seemed obsessed with the UK and single payer cheerleaders, I thought I’d let you in on something:
Britain is NOT “single-payer” system. In a “single-payer” national health insurance system (Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc.) health insurance is publicly administered but [mostly] privately delivered. Great Britain and Spain have “national health services”, where physicians are most salaried and hospitals, publicly owned and operated.
OK? Good. Now lets move on. Single payer, triple payer, socialized, or forced labor . . . whatever you’d like. It really doesn’t matter how (or how much) you pay, if it doesn’t work, it is worthless.

We get too little for our health care dollar: Is this a myth?

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