What do you take away from this infographic?
The recently passed reform bill notwithstanding, the US lags behind most of the rest of the “developed” world with respect to health care.
Some of the data and their accompanying interpretations might as well be Greek to me, but the one I found most interesting was that 90% of people who received care as medical tourists in Mexico were happy with their care, as opposed to 80% of patients receiving care in the US.
What’s the most interesting observation you take away from this infographic?
Community Connection:
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4 Comments... join the discussion!
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The bigger chunk spent on administration in the US vs. Canada–what a surprise—–NOT! How much simpler and cheaper would single payer be?! But it won’t happen in my lifetime, I fear.
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While applying to medical schools, I read up a lot on this issue. The most interesting observation i got from this graph picture that 31% of the costs in United States are due to administration, compared to 16% in Canada. The problem is tricky, and I am disappointed with how the healthcare reform bill panned out. The reason the US spends so much of their GDP on healthcare is because healthcare prices are incredibly inflated, because of the government itself. Medicare and Medicaid programs do not reimburse the doctors completely because they have a lack of funding, so the physicians and hospitals inflate the prices so that the 50% of the price they receive from medicare and medicaid is actually the full price! In turn, this drives up the prices of everything, so medicare and medicaid can now gripe even more for lack of funds, and normal people without insurance or with bad insurance are forced to pay a ridiculous inflated price on the procedures when their insurances don’t cover it. It is a big mess because now many doctors won’t accept medicare/medicaid patients, and those patients are forced to go to lower-quality doctors or public hospitals, lowering the standard of care.
Creating public insurance options will not remedy this problem. It is the middle man: the insurance companies through which all payments have to go through. In my opinion, I would prefer to have basic universal healthcare and make extra insurance an optional buy, similar to what they have in Germany.
However, many jobs would be lost in the insurance market if that was ever implemented, and with the fragile economy that we have right now, I doubt even democrats would be interested.↵
