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The wrong Rx
Despite all the time and effort lawmakers have spent trying to fix our health care system, it is still the costliest in the world.
A Times Editorial
Published July 16, 2005
Businesses and health consumers already know this, but the medicine just isn't working. Whether the prescription was for managed care or fewer malpractice lawsuits or higher copayments or low-cost clinics, the political fixes have fixed little. America's fragmented health care system is still the costliest in the world.
The latest study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University researchers and reported this month in Health Affairs, offers more evidence of the same. The United States spent $5,267 per person on health care in 2002. That's more than double, per capita, what 29 other industrialized nations spent. The total amounts to 14.6 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. The United Kingdom, by comparison, spent 7.7 percent.
The costs are surging like an uncontrolled fever, and what the researchers found is that politicians are devoting an extraordinary amount of time to changes that have little appreciable impact.
The high-profile push to limit medical malpractice claims, for example, may help doctors in high-risk practices. But it won't do much to stem overall health care costs. Malpractice claims and legal bills account for less than 1 percent of health spending, the researchers said, and aren't appreciably higher than in other developed nations.
The push to get patients out of hospitals and doctor's offices for less expensive treatment options doesn't seem to help, either. Americans now see doctors less often and spend a fifth less time in hospitals than people in other countries. Yet we still pay more.
As the costs continue to climb, U.S. policymakers eventually will be forced to look at this confusing health care picture. Among the more infuriating realities is that a system that turns to Medicare for old people, Medicaid for poor people and employer insurance for workers still leaves 45-million people with no coverage at all. We pay more, per person, than any other industrialized nation and still leave almost one of every six people in the cold. That's bad medicine.
[Last modified July 16, 2005, 00:24:14]
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