I'll give you one clue: nearly every physican, clinic and hospital in this country is on contract with various private and public insurers and that contract dictates what the doctor can charge. It is no exaggeration to say the doctors have no say at all in what that reimbursement is going to be. So if prices are rising, who is raising them?
man, are you overemotional about this.
Let me answer your statement above. My answer is, who cares. It doesn't matter why or who is charging $50K for something people can get offshore for $9K. I'm sure there are dedicated physicians and workers everywhere who have nothing invested in the current system, isn't that the way it usually is? My point here is that I don't think it makes sense to buy stock in a company who is dependent on selling $500K machines to US hospitals as its sole revenue stream. I don't care about the issues, why government can't create a reasonable drug plan etc. I think the market will solve the problem fairly easily- offshore.
But the fact remains that without the hijacking of such a HUGE percentage of the US GDP, companies who live to supply hospitals with "specialized equipment" to the tune of a few hundred thousand a pop are going to suffer.
The entire premise that healthcare is going to be the growth industry of the next century implies there are funds coming from somewhere to pay for it. This article below has a lot of statistics. Does this imply the market for US healthcare is going to grow or recede in your opinion? Where is the increase in money going to come from to create the explosion in demand for this kind of equipment? Are we going to start spending 30-40% of our GDP on healthcare?
In 2001 national health care expenditures in the United States totaled $1.4 trillion, increasing 8.7 percent from the previous year compared with a 7.4 percent increase in 2000. In the mid-1990s annual growth had slowed somewhat, following an average annual growth rate of 11 percent during the 1980s.
The United States spends a larger share of the GDP on health than does any other major industrialized country. In 2000 the United States devoted 13.3 percent of the GDP to health compared with 10.6–10.7 percent each in Germany and Switzerland and 9.1–9.5 percent in Canada and France, countries with the next highest shares.
In 2001 health expenditures as a percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) increased to 14.1 percent, up from 13.3 percent the previous year.
The rate of increase in the medical care component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was 4.7 percent in 2002 and 4.6 percent in 2001, compared with 3.4 percent per year during 1995–2000. During the last 3 years, the CPI for hospital services showed the greatest price increases (6–7 percent in 2000 and 2001 and 9 percent in 2002), compared with other components of medical care.
medicalnewstoday.com |
