Monday, September 23, 2013

Why US Healthcare Costs So Much

Some guy -- if he said his name, I didn't catch it, though he's talking to someone named "Hank" -- explains, far more entertainingly than you'd expect, exactly why the US spends a lot more than similar countries on healthcare and gets much less than they do:



Addendum, several hours later: I believe this guy is trying to be honest and nonpartisan, which is nice, but he skates over the most glaring issue: all that extra money that Americans spend on health care goes primarily to device manufacturers, drug companies, and health-care companies. (Doctors are also paid better in the US than elsewhere, but that's a relatively minor component of the cost differential. There are other minor components as well, most of which he at least mentions.)

So the main obstacles to reform are the entrenched players in those industries, who have huge war-chests funded by their decades of massive profits. And they can be expected to play about as fair as any industry threatened with the evaporation of most of their profit would.

Update, five days later: The video disappeared from this post (why, I have no idea), so I've restored it. Also, the vlogger has been identified -- as I could have done, if I clicked just one more time -- as author John Green, which makes me even happier: I like to find out that the smart, articulate people who agree with me are also writers, since I already believe in their superiority.  

1 comment:

Dave Smith said...

FYI - it's John Green, the New York Times Bestselling Author of The Fault in Our Stars. Hank is his brother. Together they do a vlog called "Vlogbrothers" where they regularly "converse" back and forth via the vlog format.

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