Monday, October 31, 2016

Composition of Healthcare Costs in the U.S.

I dug up this CDC report on healthcare in the US. I encourage the interested reader to skim around the report. Here's the relevant info I was looking for.
Expenditures for hospital care accounted for 37.9% of all personal health care expenditures in 2014. Physician and clinical services accounted for 23.5% of total personal health care expenditures, prescription drugs for 11.6%, and nursing care facilities and continuing care retirement communities for 6.1%; the remaining spending was for other types of personal health care expenditures
So, a huge part of health care spending, 37.9% + 23.5% = 61.4%, in the US seems to be hospital care and clinical services. This seems to confirm this article's point that primary drivers of healthcare costs in the US are physician and nurse salaries.

Even if we accept that Big Pharma scam the American people, with prescription drugs constituting only %11.6 of total expenditures, drug costs are relatively little compared to hospital and clinical services.

There is of course another question that I'm curious about. With much greater healthcare costs, are the Americans getting better healthcare? In other words, they are paying more; but are they getting more in return relative to other countries?

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