Replies to post #72422 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[brainlessone]

I spoke with some canadians here about drug costs

it is clear that the retail price in canada is usually but not always lower.

but in canada health insurance does not cover the cost of prescriptions
]

so canadians pay full boat, even when insured

also they wait 9 months for an mri or a surgury

one interesting note is that if tort costs are 1percent of health care costs, then it means that physician fees are only 2-3%

the rest of the money goes to hmo administration and corporate costs,plus allthe others

25 years ago there was no 20 percent to 40 percent loss of the health care dollar because of corporate overhead

[Zeev Hed]

Thanks for the site. I usually used 15% of GDP, but recently, in one of the news reports, they cited 20% thus the change. 15% does seems more rational. My point is simple, don't add money to the spending on health care system, just reduce it to be 2% above the percentage spent by the rest of the world, that will bring it to about 11.6%. That will save each year $300 B, or as politicians like to calculate it, $3 Trillions over the next 10 years. Here is what you do:

Tort reform: get expenditures on malpractice 1% of health care cost to .5% of health care costs, by limiting access to court to really outrageous grand error and damage to individuals. Unfortunately, that will do very little to cut over all costs, it will bring it from 14.6% to just an iota under 14.5%. Greater savings would be to cut malpractice insurance, a back of the envelope shows that about $30 B are paid out to insurance companies for malpractice insurance but "only" $15 billions are paid out annually as judgments against physicians, seems to me that these are huge profit margins.

Drug pricing: If we keep our drug expenditure to just $585/capita (still $100 more than Canada), we save about $30 B annually. How do we do it? Few steps, but a single one will get us there: resume the old policy of forbidding drug advertising in TV and other non medical journals to reduce over prescriptions and reduce drug costs by a good 15% (drug companies SG&A has grown to 30% of sales, more than twice what they spend on R&D, halving that expenditure would thus reduce drug cost by more than 15%, just by that approach, reducing the per capita by $100/year). That will bring us to about 14.2% of GDP.

We still need about 2.5% reduction, I am sure that many people here can each find a .2% to .5% savings in the system (each different from each other, for instance reducing "defensive" medicine involving unnecessary tests just for "insurance" purposes) which will bring us to a more comfortable 11.6% of GDP still well above the rest of the developed countries. If someone took the task to do that, they should make sure that it should be carried out with less regulations rather than more, creating an environment that provides more health care for less bucks. We are an ingenious nation, surely we can provide better health care than the rest of the world to our population more efficiently than we do it now, without socializing medicine.