[Ekaros]

Real truth is that health care just is massively expensive. Any efficiency gains that are also somewhat limited have been overshot by more "products".

Nurses and doctors can only handle so many patients. This has not increased that much compared to say farming or most other areas. And while there has been some gains. There is also lot more produces and costs of those.

[DrScientist]

Indeed. It's been argued that people intensive activities, like healthcare, thus become relatively more expensive as other, more automation friendly, industries become highly optinised.

ie the relative price of a new car versus a heart transplant is going to continually drop such that we spend more and more as a percentage of GDP on things like health ( and social ) care.

So it's not sure much that health care has become more expensive, as much as relatively more expensive.

The other strong effect is nobodies life is saved, death is simply delayed, and the older you get the more problems you have.

So as well as historically being relatively resistent to automation, success breeds more need.

[ryandrake]

Why is healthcare so uniquely expensive in the USA, but nowhere else?

[preg_match]

US healthcare is very expensive because it's horribly inefficient. There's lots of insurers, lots of providers, and lots of treatments. The intersections of all of that are complex and requires huge amount of overhead to resolve.

Not to mention, the entire point of insurance is to provide that overhead. They want to deny coverage, obviously, so they're going to waste doctor's time on peer-to-peer and force their own customers to aggressively advocate for their own care. It's a huge waste of time for everyone involved, but the insurance company wants that waste of time, that's what they're optimizing for. They've gotten really good at both calling all the shots and wasting time.

Your doctor is more or less a vessel for the insurance company. The insurance company is your doctor: they decide how long visits are, what you can visit for, what medications you can take, which procedures you can get, when you can get those procedures, how much they will cost, and how you will have to pay. Your doctor gets a tiny bit of freedom. Maybe they can prescribe you a medicine out of, like, 3 predetermined choices. After, of course, you've completed all the testing. And after you've tried medicines A through C. And after you've been monitored for whatever time period the insurance decides.

Yes, that's all very expensive.

[tzs]

One answer is it is more expensive compared to most of the rest of the first world countries because it was more expensive compared to them 50 years ago, and over that time the growth rates in health costs have been fairly similar for us and them.

The question then is why was it more expensive then? I've not seen much on that.

[Ekaros]

It is expensive in every developed country. USA just have made everyone involved to try to maximise their profits by shadiest possible practises.

Other places are less expensive. But it does not mean they are cheap. At least in as far as you think of general cost of living. The cost might not be directly visible, but it is there in some way.