NY Times: Are US medical costs/person really higher than elsewhere?

After Obamacare was passed medical costs quickly increased by almost 30%. Ergo, we provided about 10 million (net) Americans health insurance (3% of our population) so that everyone else could get hosed. Hmmm....that doesn't sound like good math? How did this happen? Essentially, Obama needed the insurance industry to support his plan, and guess why they did? Yup, you guessed it.

Can our government solve this problem? Only if it encourages genuine competition among healthcare providers and transparency about costs. Will letting the government take over healthcare (single payer) solve our problems? Sure...everything they touch doesn't turn to shit...haha.

Potential problems

By David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick, NY Times

Aug 27, 2023

...Americans pay more for medical care than the citizens of any other county. There are several causes, but many experts believe that the main factor is simply that the U.S. government doesn’t prevent drug companies, hospitals and insurers from charging high prices. An influential 2003 article in an academic journal made this argument bluntly in its headline: “It’s the prices, stupid.” These high prices translate into higher profits for health care companies.

Source: Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker | Data for Australia and Japan from 2020; others from 2021. All are in U.S. dollars. | By The New York Times

Still, there are some potential advantages to the U.S. system. High prices create an incentive for companies to develop new drugs, some of which save lives. Four of the world’s five largest drug companies are based in the U.S. The pharmaceutical industry warns that lower Medicare prices may hamper innovation, although many independent analysts — including those at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — predict any such effect will be minor.

Another possible unintended consequence is that drug companies will respond to lower Medicare prices by increasing prices for people on private insurance. If that happened, it would effectively shift money from younger Americans to older Americans, and would probably worsen economic inequality.

Most experts are also relatively sanguine about these potential downsides. But, as Levitt told us, “The truth is, we don’t know.”