Sunday, April 4, 2010

Health care costs

I was asked in comments what I meant by my claim that health care costs too much in the the United States. Basically I mean health care providers are paid more than is justified by the services they provide. This overpayment has several causes. Inefficient provision of services, provision of services of little or no real value and overpayment of health care workers like nurses and doctors. This is relative to other advanced societies. See for example figure 4 in this source . The United States spends more (as a share of gdp) than other rich countries on health care but does not achieve notably better outcomes.

No comments:

Post a Comment