Must-read on health care

[hudebnik]

If you care about the U.S. government's budget deficit...
If you care about the competitiveness of U.S. businesses...
If you care about economic fairness...
If you care about preventing individual bankruptcies...
If you care about health care for all...

you must read Steven Brill's detailed exploration of the costs of the U.S. health care system.

If you already know how incredibly inefficient and corrupt the system is, read the article anyway: it's even more inefficient and corrupt than you thought.

Comments

[unclrashid.livejournal.com]

This is sickening. I can add credence to his contentions with this anecdote: Someone I know was in Japan a few years ago and had a transient ischemic event. Turned out not to be serious, but it has very similar symptoms to a stroke. Her entire hospital costs (emergency room in Japan) including an MRI, came to a few hundred dollars. Compare that to costs in the US.

a similar anecdote

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

I spent a year in Winnipeg, Canada. On my last day, as I was packing boxes, I cut my finger open with a tape gun, exposing bone. My landlord (who conveniently lived next door) took me to the E.R., where I was asked my SIN (Canadian equivalent of SSN); I had one, but hadn't memorized it, so they looked it up by name and birthdate. An hour later I was out the door with three stitches in my finger, and nobody had asked for money. It probably cost the Canadian taxpayer a hundred bucks or so.

By contrast, the three or four times I've been to an E.R. in the U.S., it's taken at least two hours to even see a doctor, and at least six hours to get out the door, and the final itemized bill was in the thousands -- of which my insurance company paid a few hundred, and the rest was fiction.