The two most important numbers in American health care are 5 and 50

Five percent of people account for about 50 percent of the health system's spending.

more: http://www.contriving.net/link/cz

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  1. My wife and I are part of that 5%, but I don't know what can be done for us. We are both 100% Disabled Veterans, and there is no cure/fix for what has been done to our bodies. Let alone our minds. We are taken pretty good care of by the VA, etc… So our quality of life is pretty decent. So the only thing I can think of that could help us is for regeneration of organ, tissues, limbs and nerves to become a reality.

  2. +Robert Miller This graph is civilian spending only, so I interpret that as not including the VA budget (which should be listed as part of the DoD budget).

  3. Maybe. We see plenty of civilian doctors, that get paid via Tricare, but your probably right.

  4. A lot of money is spent on keeping very old people alive that have no chance of living much longer. If you are 90 and need a $100k heart operation medicare should say "You pay for it".

  5. That's a common misconception about extending older lives because doctors take quality of life into account when it comes to these things and someone that age isn't going to be very high on a heart transplant list.

    Sorry about y'all non-socialist healthcare though. Really should never have left the commonwealth!

  6. Heart operation does not have to be a transplant.

  7. There's a huge gap in the otherwise excellent article this links to: prior conditions. In sensible (i.e. cheaper and better outcome) medical systems, prior conditions are simply medical history and are taken into account when people are treated.

    In the US, by contrast, prior conditions disqualify you from insurance meaning people lie about them, dramatically exacerbating their problems and making treatment even more expensive and far less effective. Madness.

  8. +Shannon Roy I would point out fixing that gap is one of the core points of the ACA (aka ObamaCare) and the constraint that basically drives the entire structure of the bill.

    If you want insurers to take all comers at the same rate independent medical history, then you need to mandate that everyone have health insurance.  If you don't then people will be rational and only sign up for insurance when they are sick which kinda defeats the point of insurance.  If you have a mandate, you need to also have subsidies to make sure everyone can afford it.

    That is the basic structure of the bill, everything else (why the bill is so long) is details on how to implement the above.  This is the same structure Romney used on Massachusetts when he is governor and the same structure the Heritage institute pushed in the early to mid nineties. 

    From a policy perspective, Republicans should love ObamaCare.  They won, we have their plan not a single-payer system.

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