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Originally Posted by 0utf0xZer0
HHS would be the office that runs health services in the US, I'm guessing?
I've always wondered what exactly the US government runs that causes the US's public health spending to be higher per capita than Canada's according to OECD data when we're actually running a full public system. Where does all that money go?
(To the skeptics: look up the OECD data if you don't believe me. In Canada, we spent about $3700 per capita in 2006 on health care, with about 71% being public spending. In the US, the numbers are around $6700 and 46%. Do the math. You can verify the figures here: http://www.oecd.org/document/16/0,33..._1_1_1,00.html ) |
Well... a fair part of it is spent on paying Full Retail Price for prescription drugs under Medicare rather than negotiating for a volume discount like all the health care insurers get to do. Why is that? Because the Congress was bought and paid for by the pharma cartels to make it against the law for Medicare to negotiate for a better deal. They have been laughing all the way to the bank since "Part D" was initiated.
Basically, the last eight years have been spent as a general looting of the public treasury and taxpayer by a select group of large corporations in all the major sectors including health. Outsourcing operations to corporations ended up with them running operations just as sloppy as any government but with the additional costs of profit margin and much higher costs for executive pay.
This is part of why the "co-op plan" and the other "anything but single payer" plans are such poison pills that won't reduce costs but simply transfer more wealth into fewer hands with no effective benefit to the patient.