Health Care and Dollar Efficiency

December 27, 2019 By Deane Waldman

As U.S. healthcare slides toward collapse, Americans are looking in the wrong direction for a cure. They are trying to cut costs and save money in order to make healthcare affordable. No one is focusing what really matters: dollar efficiency.

To avoid miscommunication, terms should be clearly defined. Healthcare, one word, refers to a complex system that cost Americans $3.65 trillion in 2018 (19.4 percent of U.S. GDP). That amount is 130 percent of Great Britain’s GDP.

Health care as two words includes the services or work product of health professionals as well as the goods and devices involved in diagnosis and treatment. Health care is a legally protected fiduciary relationship between a patient and a care provider..........As a nation, the U.S. expended $3.6 trillion in 2018 on healthcare. Using latest available data, Table 1 compares U.S. spending on healthcare to other nations...........

The federal bureaucracy, the largest consumer of healthcare dollars, does not provide patient care. Thus, it is the primary driver of dollar inefficiency. If the Washington no longer dominated healthcare and Americans were free to decide their own healthcare, an approach called StatesCare, more than a trillion “healthcare” dollars would no longer be spent inefficiently and could be used for patient care. StatesCare combined with market-based medicine could dramatically improve healthcare dollar efficiency..............To Read More....