that I dont' think is very accurate. You can't look at Canada's public healthcare and our private healthcare, and say that our higher cost is because of that. My point was that there's a lot more involved, one thing in particular being that we spend a lot more money on research n'stuff.
But that's not part of the cost of healthcare as such, that's part of the cost of having an extremely profitable pharmaceutical industry which makes money for the US.
Of course it is true that when the consumer pays for a drug developed in America s/he is partly paying for the cost of development, but the same is true when a Canadian or a Belgian pays for the same drug.
The other countries with big pharmaceutical industries are the UK and Switzerland, and they have lower healthcare costs than the US. Developing profitable medicine is not a burden on the country that does it, nor is there any reason why it should particularly be a burden on the healthcare consumers of that country.
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As for jar's original point, he's right. There's a big problem in the system. For example, twice as much of our healthcare spending (proportionally to healthcare spending as a whole) is on bureaucracy compared with Canada (your choice of example, I could doubtless find countries where the different is even more pronounced). The figures are about 30% of healthcare spending as against 15%. When you look it up, this is a staggering amount of money. If we could reduce our spending on medical bureaucracy to Canadian levels, that would free up
2% of our GDP to do something other than move bits of paper around.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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