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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (109586)	4/16/2005 5:07:02 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793624

Are there no objections to his assertions about cost? I don't think a reasonable objection can be made to the assertion that we pay more. So where left with the reasons he gives for this. "One answer is doctors' salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts." I agree this is part of the reason for higher American costs, at least higher costs when measured in dollar (or Euro) terms. If however you set up a system to force doctor's pay to be lower, and nothing else really changes, than in a sense you are pushing the costs on to doctors as much as you are actually reducing costs. Its similar (if not as extreme or obvious) to the idea that a draft pushes the costs on to the draftess but can keep the currency figures for the cost down because the draftees get paid less. I say it isn't as clear cut or extreme because no one is forcing people to be doctors. Another answer is that America's health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry. I can't say this is exactly false but it is rather heavily spun. Other nations "drive a better bargain" by forcing prices down. The drug companies can accept this because they make a ton of money in the US and still make an incremental profit in other countries that they wouldn't want to lose. If they tried to tell countries that they would not accept the price limitations than they risk losing the market. The Europeans, Canadians ect. would probably allow local (or non-American foreign) companies to start producing the drug that Americans have a patent on. Combine this with the doctor issue and it seems part of the reason we pay more currency for our medical care is that we have something closer to a market system were we don't intervene to artificially keep prices down. Also in drugs the fact that the drug companies can cover their research and other overhead in the American market while other countries only have to pay enough to excede the marginal unit costs of the drugs results in an effective American subsidy to the rest of the world. As for paperwork costs I don't know as much about them. I would however say that even though we have one of the " most privatized" health care system (to use Krugman's term, "least socialized would be better because very little of out medical care is priatized, privatized implies that it used to be government/socialized), but we have a health care system that is very regulated, and also one where the threat of lawsuits is as high as or higher than just about anywhere else. The regulations, and the lawsuits and insurance against them raise costs directly and indirectly, and they probably contribute to the amount of paperwork the average case gets. Tim