[doyoulikeworms]

If the US had health care cost controls (and if every state expanded Medicaid), its healthcare system would be pretty good. It's already quite similar to the Swiss system, except for this critical lack of cost regulation.

As far as I know, Massachusetts's "Romneycare" (the blueprint for Obamacare) was improved to add these cost controls, but I don't know how it has worked out for them. They seem to have very high per capita health care costs relative to the rest of the country.

[techdragon]

Not as a criticism of your logic but out of curiosity I woul love to know if the per capita health care cost statistics you read or are thinking of, are including or excluding people not paying for health care. Its a common tactic in the manipulation of population statistics to "chose what's included" and in this case the inclusion of people not paying would lower the per capita cost and excluding the would raise it. If the Massachusetts and nation stats don't make the same choice on this matter it makes them much harder to compare fairly.

[doyoulikeworms]

Actually, thanks for prompting me to check on that stat. It came from here: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/health-spending-per-cap...

And in returning to it, I realized that it's from 2009!

That said, it seems like it's simply total health care spending divided by population per state. But I'm not sure. Either way, it's pretty outdated.