Medicare was instituted in '66. It can be from 40% to 60% of hospital inpatient volume. Tell me again how the government is new to healthcare. It has the big stick and has for quite some time.

Except that you don't really know the author at all. He spends a lot of time making fun of "social scientists," economists, and most of all, Harvard Professors. Go pick up his book, "Anti-Fragile"

If you remove deaths from traffic accidents and suicides from the numbers of all countries, US jumps to number 2.

Not to mince words. Ok, maybe I'm mincing.

But an increase from 3% to 5% is a 66% increase. Not a 2% increase.

The US has better health outcomes than most other countries related to its healthcare system. In the international report on average age of mortality, the US ranks 33rd or 35th. Everyone looks at that to show that we are way behind. But if you look at the data you find two things:

1. There is little statistical difference between 35th and 5th.
2. The US actually ranks 2nd if you remove deaths related to auto accidents and suicides. Since it would be hard to attribute those deaths to the healthcare system.

The US spends about 15% of its GDP on healthcare. Way more than any other country out there. So the answer to any question isn't necessarily spending more money. The difference between our system and the socialized medicine systems that seem to have universal coverage is how they do their rationing. The citizens of the US have a hard time dealing with healthcare rationing.

That is why most of the latest and greatest scientific marvels in healthcare come out of the US. Because if the new treatment provides just a 1% better chance of success, we take it.

Take, for example, proton beam therapy. The advantages of this technology are high for a very small subset of cancers. The cost of installing just one device is about $350 million dollars. That small subset could be serviced by just one proton beam therapy machine in the entire US. What is happening is a medical arms race with many institutions building out these things so that they can say that they have one. Then, because it is there, the doctors are using it on other cancers than the small subset where better clinical outcomes haven't been proven. But, because of the expense of the technology, insurers and CMS (Medicare) pay a lot more for this type of therapy than more traditional, less costly methods (gamma knife, stereocastic, etc).

Another example of over spending is for drugs. The US pays the most of any country for drugs. I'm not saying this is good or bad. Because the drug companies basically pay cost in Europe and practically give them away for free in Africa. That they can do this is because people in the US pay enough to subsidize the cost in Africa and profit required in Europe (drug companies will cease to invest the $2 billion per drug if there is no profit). Its just a fact of life for now.

In order to provide care to more people at a lower cost, the only thing you can do is lower costs. Increasing insurance really doesn't get you there. Lowering costs can only be done by:

1. Seeing more patients with the same number of doctors and nurses
2. Paying doctors and nurses less
3. Building less buildings
4. Investing less in equipment
5. Investing less in information technology (HUGE over the last 5 years)
5. Providing less care

What the ACA is trying to rely on is that if more people had access to basic healthcare, then they wouldn't get chronic diseases that are more expensive to treat. This is a tenuous argument since there is no evidence that this will happen from any kind of experiment. In the mean time, we need to hire more doctors and nurses causing higher costs.

Very nice post. I wish more people would go through the math before spouting off.

However, as one who lives in the US, I have never used a furlong. You can use feet for us as well. Or better yet, call 300 feet a football field, unless you are a Baltimore Ravens fan, then you would wish it was 294 feet.