First time I hear of RCA, I will have to read the analysis to evaluate, and it might already have been addressed, but ...
a) many (perhaps the majority, don't have time to source now) of the bankruptcies in the US are due to medical issues and spending, and at least 75% IIRC of those going bankrupt from medical spending HAD insurance. This is practically unheard of outside the US.
b) The rate of growth of US spending on healthcare, especially government spending on healthcare, far outstrips the rate of growth of money / wages / any other measure of something that can pay for it.
c) The same medicines by the same manufacturers and often the same production lines (not just equivalents or generics, which are much cheaper still!) often cost 10-100 times more in the US than they do in other places. The DaraPrim and QuestCor cases are famous for being outliers, but they are only outliers in the speed of price increase, not in the fact that prices in the US (but not outside the US) keep going up irrespective of costs.
It was not until I lived in new york that I heard gainfully employed people say things like "I have to stitch my cuts my self because I cannot afford medical care"; neither could I understand George Carlin's "dirty doctor" joke.
So perhaps the overall spending/GDP analysis is not direct proof, but the US medical and healthcare system is very, very sick. Karl Deninger at the https://market-ticker.org has been documenting these atrocities very dilligently since 2007.
> a) many (perhaps the majority, don't have time to source now) of the bankruptcies in the US are due to medical issues and spending
The vast majority of medical bankruptcies have nothing to do with the cost of medical care, but the disruption to career/income flow imposed by illness. This is clearly a problem in other countries as well.
> The rate of growth of US spending on healthcare....far outstrips the rate of growth of money
This is true in other OECD countries too. Further, this doesn't mean what you think it does. As our productivity rises, the share spent on consumption categories with high productivity growth (increasingly low relative prices) can decline, which frees up spending to be spent on health and other areas subject to less productivity growth (the majority of the expenditure growth corresponds to rising real health consumption tho)
> The same medicines by the same manufacturers and often the same production lines ... often cost 10-100 times more in the US than they do in other places
One might be able to find outliers of this sort, but that clearly doesn't reflect anything close to central tendencies (mean, median, mode, etc), especially when compared (accurately) to other high-income countries. Richer countries, like the US, generally pay relatively higher prices.
The US may pay a somewhat higher premium, but there are tradeoffs here vis-a-vis incentivizing innovation in the long run. It's also not widely appreciated that the US pays markedly less for generics....
a) many (perhaps the majority, don't have time to source now) of the bankruptcies in the US are due to medical issues and spending, and at least 75% IIRC of those going bankrupt from medical spending HAD insurance. This is practically unheard of outside the US.
b) The rate of growth of US spending on healthcare, especially government spending on healthcare, far outstrips the rate of growth of money / wages / any other measure of something that can pay for it.
c) The same medicines by the same manufacturers and often the same production lines (not just equivalents or generics, which are much cheaper still!) often cost 10-100 times more in the US than they do in other places. The DaraPrim and QuestCor cases are famous for being outliers, but they are only outliers in the speed of price increase, not in the fact that prices in the US (but not outside the US) keep going up irrespective of costs.
It was not until I lived in new york that I heard gainfully employed people say things like "I have to stitch my cuts my self because I cannot afford medical care"; neither could I understand George Carlin's "dirty doctor" joke.
So perhaps the overall spending/GDP analysis is not direct proof, but the US medical and healthcare system is very, very sick. Karl Deninger at the https://market-ticker.org has been documenting these atrocities very dilligently since 2007.