We Pay Much More PER UNIT Of Health Care

TW: These charts have been all over the blogosphere, but they are pretty important so in case you missed them. The theme is obvious we do not necessarily consume more health care than others but we sure do pay a lot more per unit of care than folks in other countries. The reasons are complex and for other posts but something we should keep in mind (and yes tort reform would help, a little, but that is not anywhere near the whole answer).



From Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/an_insurance_industry_ceo_expl.html

TW: This shows how the blogosphere for better or worse becomes circular.

From Economist:
"...Incidentally, I found that salaries chart on a Mark Perry post at Wall Street Pit, but he got it from a Greg Mankiw post, but he got it from a Derek Thompson post at the Atlantic, and he in turn got it from...an old Ezra Klein post. Something to beware of, out on the internets: the trail of "corroborating evidence" often looks like the information flows Dick Cheney set up to make it look like several sources had corroborated information on WMD in Iraq. Not that the figures here aren't accurate: this New York Times article confirms American doctors typically make two to three times as much as doctors in other industrialised countries."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/11/americas_health_care_bargain.cfm