No. of Recommendations: 3
Regarding the high costs of health care in the USA, one area I haven't yet seen mentioned in this thread is the legal expenses doctors and hospitals face due to malpractice legislation. The insurance costs are high, but maybe even higher are the additional testing that is done to build a defense against malpractice into the actual processes practiced.As with the other costs mentioned, this probably also falls into the "real, but tiny relative to overall expenses" bucket. Estimates of the cost of the medical liability system that include defensive medicine vary, given the difficulty of direct measurement - but they seem to be around $45 billion, give or take a few billion:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4231873/Again, in absolute terms that's a lot of money. But in relative terms, out of a $4,900 billion annual spend, it's less than a single percentage point.
There's no easy fix. There's no big pot of "waste, fraud and abuse" that can be trimmed without hitting millions of health care workers in their rice bowl. Other countries have lower health care costs because their national governments hold a monopoly (okay, a monopsony) on health care spending and are therefore able to
squeeze all of the providers and make them provide medical services for a lot less money than they could if there was competition for their services.
That's why we don't have single-payer here, even at the state level. If the government
doesn't squeeze the providers, it's too expensive to convert (which is why all the past efforts, as in Vermont, collapsed over money). If the government
does squeeze providers, the political outcry would be through the roof.
