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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: SilentZ who wrote (630435)10/5/2011 10:43:21 AM
From: Alighieri  Read Replies (1) of 1579741
 
It's going up not because demand is skyrocketing; it's going up because the demand is pretty inelastic. People will pay what they have to to save their own lives.

The bottom line is that the aggregate cost of delivering health care to the nation is what it is and the reason it escalates is increasing need, changing demographics, technology and overuse, physician behavior relative to malpractice (not entirely unjustified BTW), inflationary cost escalation, and so on...there is a prudent and affordable balance that needs to be managed and the political difficulty of managing it is immense...medicare underpayments are passed on to private carriers....changing the payer system has some effect on these expenses, more in terms of cost distribution across demographic groups but little downward effect on the cost curve...essentially the unit/cost curve dynamics of delivering that care remains more or less the same...until we find a more prudent balance of care delivered better coupled to results, one that puts some financial risk back to on the average citizen, and until we change patient expectations the cost problem will be worse than it is inherently.

With the messy, distributed, dis-uniform insurance apparatus we have in place there's no chance this problem gets any better. Most of the industrialized world has understood this point...

Al
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