Health Reform: A Response to Inflated Health Care Costs in U.S.
A look at the per capita health costs - U.S. compared to other OECD nations in 2000. Of course, since the year 2000 these costs have ballooned even further.
A poignant article in the respected journal, Health Affairs, put it best when it said that “a cycle of unsustainable spending growth followed by fervent cost containment initiatives has been a regular feature of the health care landscape for the past half-century.” As a result, the journal looked at health care spending per capita for thirty countries in the so-called “industrialized” Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) list of countries, all while record numbers of Americans choose to opt out of individual health insurance plans.
In 2002, U.S. citizens spent more than $5,260 per capita for their health care. This represented a 53% premium over any other country in the OECD list. That trend continues to this day, and it is a major catalytic factor in the health care reform movement championed by the Obama administration.
Health Affairs concludes that the two main factors in the high U.S. health care costs are:
- Defensive medicine (which leads to higher diagnostic rates and a hyper-sensitive population of doctors due to the fear of medical malpractice claims), and
- The high rates of emergency care resources vs other industrialized nations. Of course, the article in the journal tends not to oversimplify and cites numerous other potential reasons.
Whatever the case, health care spending has ballooned far beyond that of any other country (as the graph above illustrates). Where the proposed reform will take us from here is anybody’s best guess.
March 11th, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Though this is a very interesting study, it should be noted that the graph and the study mentioned in the article have different numbers. However, upon further reading, I noticed that the numbers are taken from two separate dates (2000 and 2002). Perhaps you could make this more clear in your article?