There is the question that asked every damn day.
My declining years I have had more health problems than I had 50 years prior and even with Medicare the procedures and visits are damn expensive.
Here is a look at 12 reason for the high cost of health care…..
Nobody sits down and decides to spend $15,474 on healthcare in a single year. It happens in increments – the specialist co-pay, the bill that arrives six weeks after the procedure, the prescription that somehow costs $400 even with insurance. And yet, that figure is exactly what the United States spent per person on healthcare in 2024, according to CMS National Health Expenditure data. Switzerland, the second most expensive country on earth for healthcare, spent significantly more than $10,000 per person. The average among other wealthy nations was $7,371. The U.S. is not edging out the competition – it is in a different bracket entirely.
Despite spending roughly twice as much per capita as comparable countries, the U.S. actually uses fewer healthcare services than many of its peers – meaning prices, not volume of care, are the primary driver of the gap. Americans are not visiting the doctor twice as often or taking twice as many medications. They are simply paying more for every single thing that happens when they do.
The reasons U.S. healthcare costs so much are structural, interdependent, and decades in the making. Here are twelve of them.
12 Reasons the U.S. Pays More for Healthcare Than Anyone Else
I know most of us have our opinion on this subject……
I say Medicare For All will go a long way in helping many of us cope with the health problems of old age.
Any thoughts you would like to share?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
It’s like in the US they go out of their way to make everything about the whole health care process as confusing as they possibly can. When I go in for a colonoscopy, for example, it gets billed as a diagnostic service. But if they remove a single polyp it now is no longer diagnostic but a surgical service and the whole billing system gets shifted to an entirely different category and range of prices.
Then even though my doctor, who has been doing this for 20 years, knows from training and experience that the polyps she’s removed are benign, they still have to send tissue samples to some diagnostician at an utterly ridiculous cost to have him confirm what she already knows.
This year when I went in I had to pay $1,000 up front before they would even do the procedure. That was a first. Usually I didn’t even have one of those stupid token “co-pay” things they stick on for “reasons”. So I just gritted my teeth and paid it. Then 4 months later a $1,000 credit showed up on my credit card bill out of the blue. My wife did some digging into the odd name associated with the credit and found it was the clinic reimbursing us for the $1,000 “co-pay” they’d dinged us for.
One year we got a bill out of the blue for $700 for ambulance services for a ride to the ER I’d been on when I’d had severe food poisoning six months earlier. But according to the paperwork I had, my insurance covered the cost of the ambulance. The little weasels were trying to double bill me for services the insurance company had already paid.
When my mother was in assisted living the management there called me one day because they’d noticed she was being billed by two different companies for the rental of a wheel chair. The second billing turned out to be blatant fraud and we turned them over to the feds who actually did their jobs for once and nailed the owner for medicare fraud because she wasn’t the only one they were billing like that.
The older I get the more convinced I am that the whole health care system in the US is designed not to care for our health, but to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out of us, any way they can.
That same thing happens on Medicare as well….I got a bill for $1200 was for work they had to send to god know where…..it is ridiculous. chuq
Your system changed the whole concept of medical care from looking after people to looking after insurance companies and making doctors rich. It’s no secret that private healthcare cares less for the sick and injured than it does for profits and wealth-creation. It is obscene.
Best wishes, Pete.
For all I hear the UK is starting this dreadful practice….if so I am sorry. chuq
There are strong indications that if the Labour Party loses the next election, the winning party (Reform or Conservatives) will introduce a widespread insurance-based system for all but the very poor and destitute. So far, that is not in the manifesto of the current government, but you never know. They already have privatised the NHS record-keeping, and also ‘outsourced’ some clinic treatments and medical testing to private companies. But the patients do not have to pay, the NHS foots the bill.
I hope you guys can hang onto the NHS…..so much better than our system chuq
The U.S. doesn’t have a healthcare system. But, it does have a get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as a healthcare system.
Well said…..chuq
Mike Gill says Medicare/Medicaid fraud is epidemic across all 50 states in America, and calls for audits of all 535 members of Congress as the primary means to root out the decades-long swindle:
See more: MikeGill44 (Rumble) and/or Stacy aka Crash (YouTube)