A new analysis of why the U.S. spends more on healthcare than other rich countries joins the chorus researchers began singing in 2003: “It's the prices, stupid.”
“The United States spent approximately twice as much as other high-income countries on medical care, yet utilization rates in the United States were largely similar to those in other nations,” wrote study authors Irene Papanicolas, Liana Woskie and Ashish Jha of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the London School of Economics and Political Science. “Prices of labor and goods, including pharmaceuticals, and administrative costs appeared to be the major drivers of the difference in overall cost between the United States and other high-income countries.”
Spending on pharmaceuticals was $1,443 per capita in the U.S., double the average of $749 for the 11 countries studied. American generalist physicians also made nearly twice the average for all the countries, at $218,173, with similar trends for specialists and nurses. But a bigger proportion of U.S. spending went into administrative healthcare costs: 8% of GDP, compared to an average of 3%. Most of the data for the study published in JAMA came from the OECD and World Bank.
