ilovecharts:

rufus:

National per capita healthcare spending Vs. Life expectancy Vs. Number of doctor visits per year

Click to enlarge. I’m no economist, but, to my understanding, this is what happens when you allow private health insurance companies to disconnect between product and profit—they choose maximize profit. A proper governmental response would be to either rigorously control the quality of the product (regulation) or to remove profit from the equation altogether by making healthcare a government service (the much-discussed “public option”), but either way, it’s clear that a more active governmental approach is necessary. A responsible modern government simply cannot allow the free market to dictate the quality and cost of healthcare for its citizens.

This is going to be big as the House and Senate reconcile their approved versions of the healthcare reform legislation, especially considering whether or not the final product will include the Senate’s public option. The final bill will, of course, make use of a number of methods for helping the system, mixing regulation of the private sector with government-run services with direct funding to certain problem areas in need of support. The real question will be how these different pieces are balanced; will we be seeing reform that continues to rely on private insurance companies, albeit with (hopefully) more active governmental oversight, or will we see a shift towards federally-administered healthcare for Americans under the age of 65? Yes, it’s all shades of gray here, but that doesn’t mean the hue doesn’t matter.

Just some food for thought: the overhead for American private health insurance companies runs usually averages between 12 and 14 percent, and sometimes goes even higher than 30 percent (usually in the cases of individuals seeking insurance on their own rather than through an employer), which, as with the above graph, explains why Americans are paying the highest premiums in exchange for a below-average product; American insurance companies spend huge amounts of time, manpower, and paper on making sure their customers jump through all the hoops before receiving their service, and then pay for those operating costs by passing them on to those same consumers. That’s right—you’re paying your insurance company to find ways to deny you service. As for Medicare, the country’s only federally-run universal (among seniors, that is) healthcare program? An average overhead of 3 percent. Think about it.