Bradford Plumer makes a point that few journalists ever acknowledge:
Health care costs, of course, aren't rising because of some insidious inflation mechanism that's making all our favorite treatments magically become more expensive. Nor are they really rising because we're aging as a population—that's a part of it, but only a small part. No, health care costs are rising primarily because new and new treatments are coming to the market, and people are choosing to spend a lot of money on them.
America spends 14% of its income on health care; much of the rest of the world spends about 9%. Yet, "we" (you? I suppose I'm here now, and getting American health care) don't appear to get much extra health. Tho' health is hard to measure. Americans certainly get more choice about what kind of health care they receive. I'd say that's over-rated, but what would I know, I [will tempt fate with this sentence] rarely go to the doctor anyway.
You could argue America is a rich country, and who cares what it spends its trillions on. But the problem is, what if the decision to spend those trillions is being made by the wrong people in the wrong way? That is why total national expenditure on health care is going up. Many of these new treatments are wonderful, in the sense that they don't kill you, but it's not always clear that they are wonderful enough to justify their price.
Posted by robe0419 at February 23, 2005 1:42 PM