The U.S. spends about 35% of what's spent in the world on healthcare? Talk about a misleading statistic and statement! If this were true then it should be considered criminal and the greedy CEO's, doctors, and politicians responsible for this should all be rounded up and put in jail. Besides palm greasing and greed, I suspect that there is also lot of waste that contributes to the overall healthcare costs.
Below is part of a quote that appeared in an article a number of years and in my opinion probably still applies today.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/health-co...countries/
Quote:For hospital care in particular, how much more does the U.S. spend? Do we know why it’s more? What might the U.S. learn from other OECD nations in this area?
Pearson: A large amount of higher overall hospital spending in the U.S. can be explained by services costing more in U.S. hospitals rather than because U.S. hospitals are delivering more services. When we look across a broad range of hospital services (both medical and surgical), the average price in the United States is 85 percent higher than the average in other OECD countries. To put this in perspective, a hospital stay in the United States costs over $18,000 on average. The countries that come closest to spending as much — Canada, the Netherlands, Japan — spend between $4,000 and $6,000 less per stay. Across OECD countries, the average cost of a hospital stay is about one-third that of the U.S., at $6,200.
As we have previously said, many OECD countries use strong regulation to set prices that hospitals can charge for different services, and some of them even set budgets for how much hospitals can spend. The quality of care delivered in hospitals in these countries are comparable to that in the U.S., and universities are still able to attract the best students to medicine.
If strict price control is not a path that the U.S. wishes to follow, an interesting example that the U.S. could learn from is Switzerland, where the national government provides a ranking of hospital services from most expensive to least expensive. Groups of insurers and hospitals across different regions then use the national government’s ranking to negotiate what prices they ought to pay across the board.
Such an approach still leaves room for differences in prices across regions and states, but it could help smooth out some of the huge differences you see in prices paid for the same services delivered in the same hospital, depending on whether a patient is on Medicare, Medicaid or their own health insurer.
