The nonpartisan McKinsey Group has released a study called "Accounting for the Cost of Health Care in the United States." The idea, as the title suggests, is to figure out, in a rigorous and methodical way, why we pay so much more than any other developed country. To do this, McKinsey constructed the Estimated Spending According to Wealth (ESAW) index, which adjusts cross-national health spending for increases per capita earnings (you would expect, after all, that a country which makes more money would pay more for care) and creates a clean baseline for comparisons. On this metric, we overpay to the tone of $477 billion per year, or $1,645 per capita. The question is why. (Note: From here on out, most numbers refer to the amount we spend above what ESAW would predict)
The very short answer is that we pay more for unites of care. McKinsey estimates that it is not higher disease prevalence. Differences in health account for only about $25 billion of the variation -- a drop in the bucket. The difference really is that we pay higher doctor salaries, higher drug costs, higher operation costs, more per day in the hospital, etc, etc. In essence, we're getting a terrible deal.
Take drugs. The report finds that we overpay for prescription drugs by $66 billion. If you compare brand name drugs in the US and Canada, the same drug will cost you a full 60% more here. If you restrict that to the top selling drugs, you find we pay 230% more than anyone else. For generics, the difference evaporates. So on average, we overpay by 60-70% for pharmaceuticals, largely because we don't bargain down the costs just like every other country. In essence, we're subsidizing the low drug costs for the rest of the world. If we demanded the discounts as well, other countries would pay a bit more, but we'd pay a lot less. This, of course, is just what the administration has been trying to prevent in their fight against allowing Medicare to bargain down prices. They believe American consumers should continue paying for the discounts of Europeans.
