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Politics : A US National Health Care System?
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To: 10K a day who wrote (1315)9/27/2006 10:27:39 AM
From: TimF  Read Replies (2) of 42652
 
Drugs are manufactured, they can be produced cheaply (the research and marketing of new drugs isn't cheap but the incremental cost of producing a new pill is normally very low).

Doctors in Mexico and India get paid less than American doctors, but the same factors I mentioned about American will apply to those countries as well as they get wealthier, they are just behind on the curve.

The problem w/ health care is 20-30 percent of the costs are administrative.

Administrative costs are one of the areas where costs could be contained. The barriers to cost cutting are sometimes legal/regulatory, sometimes part of the culture of medical care, and sometimes technical, but those are all obstacles that can be overcome, at least to a degree, with effort.

But the nature of health care as a luxury good, or the fact that doctors can only treat so many patients are factors that can't really be overcome. The demand side will continue to grow (unless you have draconian rationing), and the supply side will have some constraints. MRI machines might get cheaper (at least in real terms and esp. as a percentage of the economy), drugs can be produced cheaply (but again not researched or tested or marketed cheaply), some work done by doctors now could be done by other people. But the portion of health care that involves direct doctor care of patients will always be expensive.
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