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Looking Under the Hood of 'Socialized Medicine'

"How This Anti-Obamacare Ad Misses The Bigger Health Care Picture"

More on how and why conservative paranoia about "socialized" healthcare continues to impact negatively upon American people.

Varied approaches in countries outperforming U.S. on healthcare measures

by Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today
December 04, 2017

Americans pay too much for healthcare that falls well short of standards in other developed countries, according to a researcher who studies the issue.

But persuading people that other systems might work better often hits a roadblock, according to Eric Schneider, MD, of the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that sponsors research into ways to improve healthcare in the U.S.

"There's a tendency to say: 'that's socialized medicine; we don't do that in the United States,'" Schneider told MedPage Today.

"And that shuts down the discussion."

[...]

It's also noteworthy that the overall tax burdens in Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands don't differ markedly from the U.S., according to 2015 statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development .. https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/OECD_Tax_Wedge_Charts-04.png .. for the average worker: about 32% in the U.S. versus 31% in the U.K., 28% in Australia, and 37% in the Netherlands.

The Bottom Line

Are there lessons for the U.S.? Definitely, Schneider said.

One key finding -- repeated in the paper by Dieleman and colleagues -- is that prices are much higher in the U.S., he said, even though about half of medical spending goes through Medicare and Medicaid, whose fee schedules are "typically not all that generous."

Part of that, he argued, comes from the "relatively limited" competition in the private part of the market. In many places in the U.S., Schneider said, lack of competition means insurers, hospitals, physician groups, and pharmaceutical companies are "able to extract much higher prices ... than they can anywhere else in the world."

Americans are also sicker than people elsewhere, which drives up costs, he said.

When the investigators looked at healthcare and social services spending as a whole, they found a striking disparity, Schneider said.

"In other countries about two thirds of spending goes to social services -- housing, transportation, education -- and a third to medical care services," he said. "In the U.S. it's the reverse."

"To the extent we allow poverty and income-related problems, people tend to show up sicker in our system and thus require more intensive services," he said.

And, Schneider noted, the top performing countries tend to have relatively more primary and less specialist care. "That also tends to inflate spending," he said. Even though patients in many other countries actually use more medical services than Americans, the doctor they see is not usually a specialist.

Finally, Schneider said, there's the sheer volume of administrative overhead in the U.S. "There's a lot of effort and personnel needed to decide what the payment will be for a particular service for a particular patient," he said, "and there's not a lot of standardization."

Streamlining that process, he said, could cut American health spending by as much as 20%.

last updated 12.04.2017

https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy/69634
Conservative paranoia of 'socialized' healthcare retards American progress.

Under the Trump presidency Americans will be sicker. For one, think of the increased mental conflict encouraged/created by Trump's well-documented attraction to spitting in
the face of fact and truth. That in itself has to produce more mental dissonance. There is no doubt that Trump's personality and persona alone will have a negative effect
on American's health. Then you have Republican healthcare policy. Fewer Americans will have sufficient healthcare insurance. Sicker and less insured. Weird, eh.

See also:

Health Insurance "For Everybody"
and the "Government Will Pay" Says
"Republican" Donald Trump. AGAIN.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=127897623

Being an American is life-threatening
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129484654