It costs as little as $10 and as much as $10,169 to get the same blood test in California. A lower-back MRI priced at $199 at one Florida clinic goes for $6,221 in San Francisco. A shoulder X-ray can run anywhere between $21 and more than $700 across the United States.
In Spain, a 30-day supply of Truvada, which helps prevent HIV-AIDS, costs an average of $559, according to data compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans. In the United States it’s $1,301. In Britain, the average price of an angioplasty is $7,264 versus $31,620 in the United States. Hip replacement in New Zealand is $15,465. The U.S. figure is $29,067.
Many things about health care delivery in the United States are insane. Economist Kenneth Arrow crisply described the biggest insanity back in December 1963. “Insurance,” he wrote, “removes the incentive on the part of individuals, patients, and physicians to shop around for better prices for hospitalization and surgical care.” When did you last go bargain-hunting for a urinalysis?
This is the third-party-payer problem, and if Republicans had been more modest and less inept in advancing a realistic health care agenda, they might have spent the past seven years understanding, explaining and changing it. Instead, it was “repeal and replace” all the way to the political Verdun in which they now find themselves.
What is it that Americans don’t like about their health care? Chiefly, skyrocketing insurance premiums, higher deductibles and decreasing access to services. Obamacare has made all this worse.