Wednesday, July 22, 2009

 

Here is what I keep pointing out to my students and anyone else that will listen to me:

The United States now devotes one-sixth of its economy to medicine. Divvy that up, and health care will cost the typical household roughly $15,000 this year, including the often-invisible contributions by employers. That is almost twice as much as two decades ago (adjusting for inflation). It's about $6,500 more than in other rich countries, on average.

If you think health care reform will make health care too expensive, guess what? It already is.



1 comment:

Don Durito said...

I once commented that the US is a multivariate outlier when it comes to healthcare. An enormous amount gets spent with very little to show for it. One example: If you live in Portugal, you can have the same lifespan as someone who lives in the US for about 1/3 of the cost in health care expenses.