Posted on 04/11/2025 3:45:37 AM PDT by davikkm
The goal of the healthcare industry in the United States is to take as much money away from you as possible. I truly wish that I was exaggerating, but I am not. Can you guess which nation spends the highest percentage of GDP on healthcare? Without looking it up, you probably already know that it is us. Gigantic pharmaceutical corporations and massively bloated health insurance companies are raking in colossal mountains of cash, and yet the quality of the healthcare that we receive in return is rather quite poor. People living in Albania, Panama and Kuwait have higher life expectancy rates than we do. Residents of Belarus, Cuba and Latvia have lower infant mortality rates than we do. We are the most medicated population on the planet and yet we are also one of the sickest. If the U.S. healthcare system was a country, it would have the 6th largest economy on the entire globe and yet rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes continue to soar.
The numbers that I am about to share with you are absolutely stunning. For as much money as we spend on healthcare, we should have the greatest system in the world by a wide margin.
But we don’t.
We have lost our way, and I don’t know if we will ever be able to find our way back.
(Excerpt) Read more at citizenwatchreport.com ...
And this is how we got Luigi Mangione, folks. And this is why half the country is not mad at him, including me.
I agree.
The ‘colossal’ health care industry just wants a big farm of sick people, but it’s not a conspiracy let people take very poor care of themselves and be there when they need some fixing up. People (Americans) are generally overweight, sedentary, and make poor lifestyle choices.
It’s not the job of a roofer, painter, or plumber to come and inspect your house to every six months and mitigate any problems that start to crop up. They come when you call them.
Read the labels on processed food. They’ve been trying to kill us for a long time.
True but not all of us live this way. I spent my whole life on a diet and started my exercise craze in my 50’s and can’t stop. I feel like a 10 at my age with a generation of overweight millennials. I remember we starved ourselves in the 80’s to stay thin.
And drugs and alcohol.
My wife just got diagnosed with breast cancer. Instead of just dealing with the illness, she’s stressed out beyond belief worrying about if the doctors have her best interests or the insurance company’s best interest in mind.
We fully distrust the medical establishment, especially after the last few years.
Some of that distrust was confirmed a few years ago. Our son had surgery. A few hours later I was in the hospital elevator and the surgeon and another doctor came in. She introduced me to him and discussed my son for a couple minutes. The dirtbag other doctor subsequently added a $800 bill for his “consult” to our bill. We found it buried in the line items and refused to pay.
Many people use the ER for their family doctor, even though government assistance is available to them. They are too lazy or too stupid to apply for it! They just walk out after treatment.
So, the hospital sends the accounts to collection. The collection people make application for the people who got treatment and the hospital gets pennies on the dollar… the collection guys get the rest.
Then the hospital recovers the rest of the money lost to the cheaters by padding the bill for everyone they treat … who HAS coverage.
1. The taxpayer is stiffed to fund government programs for the ‘underserved’
2. The taxpayer pays premiums on a health plan for himself and family (This increases all the time)
3. The taxpayer pays a deductible-out of pocket
4. The taxpayer pays for office visits-out of pocket
5. The taxpayer is overcharged by the hospital… to help the hospital recover money lost to collection guys
THE TAXPAYER JUST PAID FIVE (5) TIMES… and the doctor hasn’t touched him yet.
On the other hand, some of our “care” sucks.
I had symptoms of blood clot in my left calf and went to the emergency room to get it checked out. They told me it might be a water cyst and not to worry - it never got better so I got a referral to a Vascular place and it turns out I had a severe DVT - it could have killed me if I hadn’t gone elsewhere for a second opinion.
Probably a result of the chemo from acid-induced esophageal cancer.
“These RINOs will never be forgiven.”
If that were true then most seats up for re-election in the mid-terms will go to either staunch MAGA candidates or brain dead democrats.
I haven’t looked into the numbers carefully since the Obamacare wars, but at that time:
Obama and the socialized medicine crowd were making bank on the comparison of U.S. life expectancy stats with other countries. Among peer group countries, however, the U.S. life expectancy rates jumped from relatively low to #1 if you corrected for two factors: automobile fatalities and homicides. The latter figure, of course, is driven by extremely high homicide rates among the usual suspects; look at people by ethnicity, and Americans of German, English, and other European origins look quite comparable to their cousins who stayed on the other side of the pond.
If we corrected for obesity and its various complications, the U.S. advantage would probably grow. Obesity is primarily a question of diet and exercise, which is in turn driven by lifestyle and that loops us back to Americans’ automobile habit. European cities, for example, are generally much older and much denser, and people do a lot more walking. Aside from some of the older, denser, most eastern cities, we have designed most American cities and suburbs for lard-butt couch potatoes who jump in their cars to do just about everything. In a lot of places, just getting suburbs to put in sidewalks (which, properly designed, can double as functional bike paths, since most of the lard-butt neighbors are in their cars anyhow) is a big fight. It’s not just our food and dietary choices that make us fat; our transportation system is designed to make us fat.
The U.S. spends vastly more on neonatal interventions and intensive interventions for the elderly, which are extremely expensive. A very high percentage of Americans’ lifetime medical costs are incurred in the last six months and last year of life. We do major medical interventions — hip and knee replacements are a familiar example — far past the point at which other OECD countries simply make people comfortable and wait for them to die. That’s how rationing works. Worker drones are kept alive. The sooner retirees shuffle off this mortal coil, the better, because that is a cost saving to governments.
It requires getting down into the weeds, but one of the clearest tests of the effectiveness of national healthcare systems per se is life expectancy AFTER diagnosis of a major medical problem. The U.S. is almost invariably at or near the top of the list. Again, the U.S. excels at the high tech end of the scale — and that is expensive.
Other factors include the statistics themselves. The U.S., for example, counts as “live births” many infants who are very premature or who have serious problems and that other countries count as stillborn. The other big factor in the infant mortality stats is demographics; the higher U.S. numbers are driven heavily by the drug addicted baby mommas on the Cheetos diet who don’t bother with any of the maternal care that is available to them, don’t follow through on medical instructions, and pop into emergency rooms to deliver low birthweight preemies. The healthcare system can’t fix stupid, ignorant, and self-destructive. Nor can it fix meth and fentanyl addiction.
The U.S. system is excellent if we compare apples to apples and correct for confounding factors. Socialized systems are reasonably good at dispensing routine, cookie cutter care — and for most people most of the time, that is most of what is needed until something bad hits or aging becomes a factor. If all you need is aspirin and routine inoculations, the Canadian system is fine. If you have a major medical issue and would like to bypass the long queue, and are not part of the nomenklatura and can skip the lines ... well, the U.S. border is close if you can afford to pay for U.S. quality care.
Public perceptions are confused by the U.S. third party payment system, which is the outgrowth of a WWII gray market improvisation that became popular with the unions and with politicians, for whom it provided a tool for hiding subsidy costs. At this point, the whole pricing system is a sham designed to conceal true costs from consumers in order to facilitate cost shifting in favor of politically favored groups. The impact of the tort lawyers and, in response, defensive medicine that over-relies on excessive testing is significant.
The basic choices are pretty clear. We can continue to drift towards a heavily rationed socialized system that dispenses cookie cutter clinic medicine, or we can shift to a more market driven system. The latter would require greater price transparency and consumer choice.
The big related question is whether Americans are overinvesting in high tech care, especially end of life care. Much of the demand for this is driven by the absence of price transparency; as long as insurance companies or the government will pay for it, why not? Even at this point, however, we need to keep in mind that this very high tech stuff leads to technological breakthroughs that, over time, dramatically change outcomes at earlier and earlier points of disease progression. It’s like many other high tech fields in which the early adapters pay “insane” prices for capabilities than in 20 or 30 years — a lot sooner in consumer electronics, where it may be five years — will be mass market. The U.S. continues to drive most of the innovation.
But that costs $$$$$$.
#1 The U.S. spends about 5 trillion dollars on healthcare each year.
#2 What the United States spends on healthcare is greater than the GDP of the United Kingdom.
#3 If the U.S. healthcare system was a country, it would be the 6th largest economy in the entire world.
#4 Federal, state and local governments account for nearly half of all healthcare spending in the United States.
#5 Today, more than 68 million Americans are enrolled in Medicare.
#6 If you can believe it, more than 71 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid.
#7 Does it seem like almost half of the commercials on television are for pharmaceutical drugs? You may not be surprised to learn that pharmaceutical companies actually spend more than 15 billion dollars on television advertising in the United States each year.
#8 According to one survey, 61 percent of U.S. adults are currently taking at least one pharmaceutical drug.
#9 Globally, the pharmaceutical industry brings in about 1.6 trillion dollars in revenue each year. That is more money than the Pentagon spends.
#10 There are 10 pharmaceutical industry executives that received total compensation of at least 20 million dollars in 2023.
“I bet most health issues are self-inflicted”
Blame the people? Wonderful.
You obviously have not gone thru the system.
It took me 2 years and nearly a dozen doctors to get legitimate healthcare for a spinal cord/CNS injury. The doctor that worked on it does not take insurance. Cash or check at before treatment. $15K later and I can feel warmth on my R side. ‘Traditional’ healthcare just ran down my insurance, did stupid injections (for a pin pinching a CNS nerve) and, like you, were oblivious to the actual health issue.
It’s all run for profit. They follow cut sheets and flow charts. Doctors are penalized or worse for thinking outside the box, i.e. ‘what’s going on here’ and ‘what will help my patient’.
It’s totally, totally broken.
Next stop is R/T airfare to Taiwan, Thailand or Malaysia for medical treatment. Quicker and cheaper then being used by the US industry FOR THEIR OWN PURPOSES.
There is zero accountability. So the consumer must choose another provider.
Covid did a pretty good job of proving that.
Thoughtful and well-stated post, Sphhinx.
Thanks!
Here’s some fundamental problems:
1) government should not be in the charity business, nor paying for health care.
2) government should not be dictating the content of insurance policies.
3) government should not force someone to get insurance for someone else (employer provided).
4) government SHOULD be making sure insurance companies are clear in their publication of what they cover, and have them publish records of paid/unpaid claims.
5) government SHOULD be making sure providers publish accurate information concerning the cost of treatment, much like you’d get for a car repair - paying for an estimate first to diagnose, then the cost of proposed solution along with cost of typical problems that may come up.
First of all when it comes to Medicare it’s not the doctors that set the fee schedule, it’s Medicare and what the doctors get versus what is billed is quite low. Then tack on the heavy cost of malpractice insurance and you will realize why there are so few, relatively, having private practices. The doctors generally work for large insurance companies such as Kaiser, or as employees for a large medical group and take a straight salary...that’s why you get hustled out pretty quick at the doctors because just like a busy restaurant it’s all about turnover.
I’m in my 70’s. I still cut, split, and stack a couple cords of wood every year. I mow our lawn, & weed whack. I walk the dog, do the grocery shopping and cooking since my wife still works, and try to make balanced meals. I recently remade our front steps power washed and hand brushed a preservative on the whole outside of the house (it’s a log house). My next project is new rails for the back deck. I don’t take any meds except an occasional anti-acid. My only vice is beer. I love the stuff, a good microbrew or wheat beer. A couple bottles a day but not while being a couch potato, got to spoil myself a bit, especially while cooking, seems to me cooking and beer drinking go together.
It shocks me that any Free Republic conservative is in favor of shooting health care executives because of being pissed off about health insurance issues.
But you and others have expressed the same sentiment. So there you go,, have your opinion.
I’m sure lots of people become obese because they eat too many sweets to self soothe and don’t have the energy to exercise because they are depressed. There are many things in today’s world that fuels depression and the solution is to throw an SSRI at it because fixing the culture isn’t possible and neither is making people treat each other well, aside from our mental health care services not being up to par.
While I agree the US Health care System has its problems, a lot of these “FACTS” are nonsensical.
Yes, the UK’s GDP is less than the US spends on health care... but the UK also has a total of less than 70million people, vs the US’s 330 Million people and the UK’s GDP per capita is less that the GDP per capita of the US’s poorest state!.. That’s right the entire UK GDP per capital is lower than the GDP per capita of Mississippi. Also the UK other than some outlying territories has a smaller territorial footprint that is smaller than 11 US states. SO, the fact we spend more on health care than the the UK GDP is a nonsensical fact in proving anything, other than the UK is an economic mouse compared to the US.
As to facts on State and federal spending.. let me let you in on a “secret”... here’s the truth, unvarnished and a fact that ALWAYS is ignored when this topic comes up.
80%, 80% of what is spent on an individual for health care, over their entire lifetimes, on average is spent during the last 2 years of their life. And for most people, guess what, that’s when you are on medicare. Want to cut US health care spending by 80% overnight? Start letting the old folks die, rather than giving them expensive treatments to extend their lives for a few more years, just like the UK does, and the total health care spending will instantly be 80% less. SO hello Mr 72 year old, with chronic liver failure from being obese your entire life, no, we aren’t going to provide treatment. Here are some pain killers, go home and enjoy the last few months you have.
I will happily critique the US health care system, but this sort of article is a garbage article that clearly was written by someone who hasn’t spent a single second in the industry.
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