The Top 10 Reasons for Soaring Health-Care Costs: The Naked Economist - Yahoo! Finance
Increasing healthcare costs have a direct effect on the ever increasing cost of health insurance. Charles Wheelan wrote a great article detailing what he thinks are the top ten reasons, click here to read the whole article:
- Nobody shops for value
- Medical innovations are more expensive, not less
- Health care is a luxury good not and inferior good (technical terms in economics)
- We don’t pay for what we consume
- Baumol’s disease
- The old…older people have greater health care needs
- The uninsured…lack of primary or preventative care leads to more expensive care later in life
- The fat and lazy…come on, smoking too much, eating too much, not enough exercise..we all know it is unhealthy
- Any medical success begets a later medical expense and end of life care is expensive
- Malpractice
Wheelan gives a great description of each and you should read the whole article. I like’d the way he summed it all up:
“What’s my solution? Thankfully I’ve only got space here for the diagnosis. But that should make clear that there’s no single cure — because there’s no single problem. Any serious and pragmatic fix for the system will require six or eight pills, not one. And even that will be treatment, not a cure.”