Peter Schiff has posted a video regarding the US being 27th in the world in wealth per capita. I have to wonder if that’s not directly related to the US health care scam, and the drag that it imposes on the US economy.
The fact that the US ranks last among major industrial nations in health care outcomes is pretty well publicized, although a broad segment of Americans would prefer to ignore that fact. The fact that its health care costs are the highest in the world is well known in some quarters, not in others, where again, the preference is to be ignorant.
I’ve often mentioned the fact that US health care costs absorb 18-19% of GDP, while the rest of the world is around 10-11%. The US medical industrial mafia syndicate that controls the delivery of medical services in the US skims 7% of GDP. If you have any interest in statistics on how the US stacks up with the rest of the world in terms of outcomes and costs, this paper is chock full of them. Those who prefer to remain ignorant are welcome to. Be my guest.
I just want to show something very simple in one picture.
I want to to illustrate the US medical mafia skim that marks up the true cost of the service by 70% and steals 7% of our productive worth each year. Now at 17.9% of GDP, Kaiser Health says that figure will rise to 20% in eight years. The medical mafia skim now totals $1 trillion per year, and that will only increase in the years ahead. That’s $7,500 per year, per average US household. Every American household is paying that much to a mafia protection racket. That’s what the US medical industrial complex is, a protection racket.
This is outright legalized theft, and it will become even more entrenched under the OCare fraud. It is just another transfer of wealth from the US middle class, in this case to the medical mafia syndicate kingpins and their capos, extracting the vig at every layer of this legalized criminal enterprise. The pigmen at the top of the scam are multibillionaires.
The true cost is what it costs to deliver health care in the rest of the world. Most of those countries have small private systems in addition to their public health systems, and virtually all have private enterprise participants, particularly drug and medical equipment companies, who earn substantial profits included in their sales. These base costs in all other nations therefore include a profit element. Our medical mafia adds a 70% markup on top of that base.
US medical doctors (not including primary care docs) earn double what specialists earn everywhere else in the world. Hospital fees are double, triple, or even quadruple. Hospital administrators in the US are paid millions, often 5 to 10 times what health care admins earn anywhere else in the world. Insurance sales forces are paid billions. Medical advertising adds billions more. None of those costs even exists elsewhere in the world to any appreciable degree.
Drugs cost two or three times as much in the US. Labs and clinics charge two or three times as much. Those labs and clinics are often owned by the doctors who are overcharging for basic services. Then they order excessive tests and overcharge again.
Only in the US is this legal. Every other nation on earth has stopped the theft by crushing the medical cartels. Americans need to wake up and demand an end to this rampant, entrenched criminality. The alternative is that the middle class will ultimately be squeezed out of existence in any recognizable form. And some will still be shut out of the system altogether under Ocare.
Meanwhile this system penalizes US competitiveness in the world. If it costs 70% more here, and employers must bear the cost, then how can US companies compete? Simple, they move their operations to places where they aren’t responsible for the cost of health care.
The OCare fraud that takes full effect next January solves none of the cost issues. In fact, it simply further entrenches the US medical mafia skim. The US will remain uncompetitive with the rest of the world. Americans will continue to be robbed of their wealth by the medical industrial mob syndicate. The vast majority of self employed Americans who are just shy of Medicare age will be forced to go without health insurance. The cost of insurance for a married couple aged 60 and over is in excess of $2,000 per month in most of the most populated areas of the country. Those earning more than $46,000 per year won’t be eligible for government subsidy, so unless that person’s income is well into 6 figures, purchasing health care won’t be an option.
OCare solves none of these issues. It entrenches the skim, and will continue to leave millions with no coverage at all. It’s a scam.
There is a solution. It’s the solution used by every industrialized nation on earth. Bust the cartels. End the skim, either via government run health care, or by treating the industry as a public utility. Tightly regulate it, and clamp down on the price gouging that makes the US system so expensive. But first and foremost, cover everybody. That’s just basic humanity. The US is the last civilized nation on earth not to do that. It is less than civilized, and it stops us from reaching our economic potential.
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This comment from longtimelurker on our message board.
Great article Lee.
Pulp, the “great Americans who are dying off” are the folks who gave us this broken system. The elderly and boomers f*ck*d up the healthcare system and then floated onto Medicare just in time. I think the younger generation are more likely than the older generation to recognize the US healthcare scam for what it is.
IMO a large part of the problem is that the healthcare system is so unequal that many have, if not a vested interest in the status quo, a lack of interest in change.
If you are on Medicare you are insulated from the problem.
If you work for any part of government, Fed, state, local you are insulated from the healthcare system by having comprehensive insurance with low deductibles. If you are ex-military you are insulated. If you work for a very large employer you are likely insulated because that employer can bargain hard with insurers. If you work in medicine you’re likely riding the gravy train.
So that leaves small non-medical businesses, the self employed and the un/underemployed who are not medicare entitled. I’m going to bet that’s far less than 50% of the population who are royally screwed by the current system. These folks don’t have sufficient voting power to enact any kind of change.
Therein lies the problem.
On NPR yesterday they were discussing Detroit’s retirees health benefit costs as a large part of Detroit’s bankruptcy problem. Find me a private sector worker under 40 who can even dream about getting health benefits in retirement. Not a chance: we have to pray we remain employed until medicare eligible. So right there what interest do public sector workers have in changing the system ?
Once the public sector starts getting reamed with the same copays, deductibles, exclusions (e.g. maternity), and premiums as small business and self insured deal with THEN we’ll see change, but not until.
https://wallstreetexaminer.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1055415&p=1139279
This comment is from pulp cutter on our message board.
I’d be happy to collaborate on an article on this. Kaiser Permanente and the Robert Wood Johnson foundation (amongst others) have produced reams of data describing the system in detailed, objective terms. Your big picture view above was pretty much dead-on.
The problem is that no one seems to be troubled enough about it to learn the facts. Those facts are right there in plain view: KP, RWJ, Medicare, and plenty of others, report yearly or nearly so in quantitative terms on what’s going on – analogous to your WSE professional edition on Fed liquidity. But the vast majority of American voters still think docs won’t treat people on Medicare (in fact, Medicare payment rates are HIGHER than the private insurers in a number of areas), don’t realize that American clinicians are paid 2X what they earn elsewhere, that the insurers skim 31% of every dollar that passes through their fingers (Medicare administers for 12%), that physicians intentionally and with huge effect limited the number of medical school graduates holding the number constant from 1980-2009 while the American population went up 50%, etc, etc.
I think the medical crisis is a symptom rather than cause. I think the real Americans – the ones who could actually face facts and face themselves – are dying off, replaced by a nation of obedient sheep. Armed to the teeth, driving their combat wannabe pickups and SUVs, to project the bad-ass image that they are so utterly unable to actually carry out.
https://wallstreetexaminer.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1055415&p=1139194