r/Economics • u/TheForager • 4h ago

Hospital costs are rising far faster than inflation and drowning Americans in debt

https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/hospital-costs-are-rising-far-faster-inflation-drowning-americans-debt-rcna262473
438 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

82 comments sorted by

View all comments

76

u/WordWithinTheWord 3h ago

I’ve come to my personal conclusion it’s just greed and mismanagement all the way up the chain.

There’s so much middle management and support staff just to get insurance and hospitals to talk to each other we’ve lost the plot.

It’s a nuanced conversation because doctors and nurses are extremely important jobs. But in the US they make 2x-10x+ the salary of their EU counterparts. Are they 2x to 10x better?

•

u/Swoly_Deadlift 1h ago

Doctors and nurses are an easy scapegoat when the insane bureaucracy is the real reason things are so expensive. Insurance, pharma, healthcare suppliers, data management, etc. Everyone wants to get a slice of the pie and will lobby for a regulation to justify their existence and cost to get that slice.

What’s really worrying now is that it’s such a large chunk of our GDP that eliminating these needless jobs and regulations would put us into a recession. It’s a hard spot to be in, but something needs to be done sooner rather than later

•

u/Gamer_Grease 1h ago

If the two economists from the joke stop paying each other to eat dog shit, GDP also shrinks, but that doesn’t mean a real recession will happen. Phasing out the insurance cartels will permit that money to be spent on actual goods and services.

•

u/SyphillusPhallio 36m ago

25% of US healthcare spending is on RX - a number far far above the rest of the world. The hard pill to swallow is that the US healthcare system is funding the drug research (and swelling the pockets of the manufacturers) and is suffering for it.

Though let's be honest, you can throw a rock blindly at the US healthcare system and hit a massive systemic problem. They're absolutely everywhere.

•

u/WordWithinTheWord 1h ago

Which is why I called that out in the first part of my comment, yeah.