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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KyrosL who wrote (51725)	3/5/2008 8:26:32 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 540836

When talking about large population outcomes, what are you talking about besides longevity and infant mortality?

To: KyrosL who wrote (51725)	3/5/2008 2:45:29 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 540836

When I said we spend twice as much as other advanced countries I specifically said as a percent of GDP. That removes relative wealth as a factor. No it doesn't, because medical care is in economic terms a luxury good. Richer nations typically consume more of it as a percentage of income. As productivity and production of other goods and services increases at a pretty good clip, productivity in medical care increases slowly, that pushes up the relative cost of medical care. And then demand for critical medical care (at least for people that are insured, and for emergency critical care even for the uninsured) is relatively insensitive to price (people don't want to die just to save a few bucks, and since the advance of medical technology keeps developing new ways to treat people, cost will tend (and has tended) to go up faster than income growth. In the future the US GDP will be larger (even in real per capita terms), and the percentage of that spent on medical care will also almost definitely be larger. This trend can't go on forever (after all you can't spend more than 100% of the GDP on medical care, and even closely approaching 100% is unlikely), but it can continue for quite some time.