We can save your life, but you cannot afford it.
This is the paradox that modern medicine has become, especially in the United States. Although medicine has grown in its ability to heal and ameliorate disease, the cost of these new technologies has become a financial burden on America and more indirectly, the world. This dichotomy has enormous economic and moral ramifications since health is one of the most important commodities in all of our lives.
Many countries have socialised methods for delivering care with an emphasis on both what is best for society balanced with what is best for the individual. The modern dilemma in the United States is that health care, viewed as a right of citizenry, has become so expensive that it has weighed down our society financially. People without the financial means to afford the high cost of health care are often subsidized so that they can receive this care.
Aggressive and expensive treatments for cancers and other poor prognosis diseases is commonplace in modern American healthcare delivery. This is especially true for low yield medicine such as cancer care and end-of-life care for the elderly. This same patient in another country may not receive such aggressive and unrealistic treatment.
An example may serve to illustrate this dilemma best: Imagine an 80 year old man, who smokes tobacco, has had relatively good health, but now has a heart attack. If he has modest savings, the cost of his treatment will likely wipe him out financially in the American system. Private insurance plans cost too much for the average person of this age and the current social subsidy programs will generally not cover the costs of care.
This patient will receive treatment though. Hospitals will be reimbursed below cost or not at all. This is why so many hospitals, both for-profit and non-profit, are closing in the United States. They simply cannot afford to provide the care. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that from 1996 to 2006, the number of emergency rooms in the United States decreased from 4,109 to 3,833. At the same time, the number of emergency patient visits rose from 90.3 million to 119.2 million – an increase of 32 percent or an average annual increase of nearly 3 million visits per year. This is unsustainable.
A succinct summary of the modern economic problems from the horse’s mouth:
“Comprehensive health care reform can no longer wait. Rapidly escalating health care costs are crushing family, business, and government budgets. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, a rate 3 times faster than cumulative wage increases. This forces families to sit around the kitchen table to make impossible choices between paying rent or paying health premiums.
"Given all that we spend on health care, American families should not be presented with that choice. The United States spent approximately $2.2 trillion on health care in 2007, or $7,421 per person – nearly twice the average of other developed nations. Americans spend more on health care than on housing or food. If rapid health cost growth persists, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2025, one out of every four dollars in our national economy will be tied up in the health system.
"This growing burden will limit other investments and priorities that are needed to grow our economy. Rising health care costs also affect our economic competitiveness in the global economy, as American companies compete against companies in other countries that have dramatically lower health care costs.” (
http://www.whitehouse.gov/Issues/health-Care).
The costs of the medicines, the physician’s expertise, the equipment for procedures and additional hospital overhead are real economic costs. If patients cannot pay, who will? Since treatment in modern American society is a “right,” society absorbs this cost through subsidy, mainly through social programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid.
As a heavy weight on the world’s largest consumer economy, the cost of ever advancing modern medicine sucks money out of the system into a bottomless void. In this deflating bubble economy, the consumer’s ability to consume has been further hindered by the exposed high costs of medicine for everyone.
The current drive towards optimization in modern American health care does reveal several good investment opportunities, especially in the areas of medical information technology, generic medication business, and preventative health. The problems affecting the delivery of modern medicine are broad in scope and many changes must occur in order for the world’s largest economies to continue to grow.
In summary, while the science and practice of modern medicine have advanced for those few who can afford it, there is huge gap in the real quality of medical care that America and the rest of the world can afford. This obvious dilemma has many economic and business ramifications for the future to be. Until the time that world finance matches up with medical technologies, most of us will experience medical health at the whim of our financial health.
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