Quote: (05-23-2014 09:32 PM)speakeasy Wrote:
What we do in this country is not working. My main criticism isn't the ACA per se, it's that we haven't seen enough reform. How can we spend 17.6% percent of GDP on healthcare while France(top healthcare system in the world) spends 11.6% and get covered from cradle to grave. It happens because Big Pharma and insurance companies pull the strings in this country with their tremendous lobbying power. Power that they don't have in other countries.
You're missing the elephant in the room:
Obesity.
Our health care costs keep rising, and will continue to keep rising, because the more obese people a country has, the more demand there is for health care services, driving the price up. Supply and demand, guys. We spend much more of our GDP on health care than France, for example, a country with an economy at a level comparable to ours, because our obesity rates are much higher than theirs. Sure, there's mismanagement in both the public and the private realm, and sure, we can focus our efforts on creating improvement there, but let's not lose sight of the elephant in the room.
You want to lower the cost of medical services? I'll tell you how, it's the same as anything else, you either increase the supply (mint more doctors, mint more nurses, construct more hospitals, etc.) or decrease the demand (by making people adopt healthier behaviors).
The problem is neither is easy to do. So instead, the parties involved blame "big pharma," "government healthcare," "private healthcare," "insurance companies," or whatever other scapegoat happens to be popular within each party at the time.
Again, there's many factors causing the large health care costs, but THE elephant in the room is obesity. The problem is that telling Americans that they themselves are the problem is not politically viable. People don't want to take responsibility for their problems, it's much easier to place the blame on the "other," some large, impersonal entity in this case, than to look in the mirror. If every American led a healthy life, healthcare costs would diminish dramatically.
Let's stop beating around the bush.