@Emac: If you watch the video you'll see that this isn't a debate about public vs private. In fact private hospitals in France, Japan and Singapore are the best in the world in terms of costs compared to treatment.
This is solely looking at the facts: 18% of Americas GDP is healthcare, 13% of Canada's is, which is second place in the world. Average OECD is 9%.
Why do Americans spend on average twice as much as anyone else?
@Jamiet, I want to say that your not doing a good job at responding to Emac. While your looking at this solely from a cost perspective, Emac is rightfully pointing out that Americas healthcare, while more expensive, is also higher quality.
You'd be hard pressed to find someone who has studied healthcare disagrees that Americans who can afford it (emphasize on affordability) get the best healthcare in the world.
While I will agree with you that its American healthcare is certainly not twice as good as UK healthcare (Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as your Brits, so overall UKs is certainly more cost-effective), your not doing yourself any good by bitching about costs against someone who is arguing about quality.
Now on to John Greens video. While I agree with everything he says after the 7 minute mark, I disagree with almost everything he says before that. He misquotes his sources and uses sketchy accounting methods to exaggerate his claims.
The source he uses claims that Americans spend 643 billion more then they'd be expected to spend. He omits this line and talks about some of the components of the 643 billion. Omitting this line allows him to talk about each follow dollar amount without context. He can decide what is a big number and what is a small number. For example, at 4:25 in the video he says that Doctors salaries makes up a total of 75 billion more then we'd expected. While he claims that this is a tiny fraction of total healthcare spending, it makes up over 10% of what his source calls 'waste' in the US system, which by no means a small fraction.
I'm even going to quote the source on something where he directly contradicts the source:
"If you were expecting a bad guy here, you’re going to be disappointed. There is no one thing to blame. There is no one fix we can make. It really is multifactorial."
John Green then goes on to say that there is one big bad guy. His bad-guy is misleading because he also sneakily combined the 1st (out-patient care) and 4th (in-patient care) largest healthcare costs in America to make his bad guy seem like a larger part of the pie then it actually he, he then bolsters their number by adding that 75 billion dollars from salaries into the in-patient and out-patient waste amount.
He also completely gets the reason inpatient/outpatient care is so expensive wrong. He credits the monopsony of a single payer system as to why its cheaper in countries like the UK. The example he uses is replaceable hips. His argument, which sounds rational is that by only have one buyer there will only be one big contract as oppose to lots of little ones, this gives an incentive for the supplier to by more cost-effective, which brings down the price.
The problem with this is that this is dead wrong. The easiest question to ask to prove this is wrong is: Why don't insurance companies, the ones who pay for 80% of treatments in America, try to negotiate prices?
So how wrong is this? While I don't have the numbers for replaceable hips, in 2011 the NAO released a study complaining that the NHS doesn't use its monopsony power. To quote the economist on this issue "A recent study by the National Audit Office showed that Britain's National Health Service (NHS) could save £500m (well over $800m) a year by bundling its buying power; there is no need for hospital trusts to buy 21 different forms of A4 file paper and 652 different kinds of surgical gloves."
Given that the NHS doesn't use its monopsony advantage to negotiate prices, and that negotiating prices would save ONLY $800m/year, the lack of price negotiating by hospitals in the states is not responsible for a large component of the $643B shortfall.
I can use basic and misleading economic logic to come to the opposite conclusion:
America has a larger healthcare market, this means supplies of equipment (eg replaceable hips) have more competitors, competition forces companies to be more cost effective.
Neither of these over basic explanations of why costs differ between America and others are correct.
What is the point in "Anonymously + Without chat"?
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