rcafdm

11 ms·

1.
by rcafdm 7y ago
Outcomes are determined by more than health system inputs alone (indeed, it has little to do with health care in the developed world), and costs have much to do with the intensity of health care. Rich countries spend more because they can,
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by rcafdm 7y ago
This is my blog. I'll check comments later on and respond if anyone has serious questions or comments.
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Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong(randomcriticalanalysis.com)
2 points by rcafdm 7y ago|1 comments
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> Your findings are not mutually exclusive with other theories about the underlying causes of high U.S. healthcare expenditure, such as a chronic lack of price transparency. My findings strongly agitate against the notion that high US he
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> We spend 17.4% of GDP on healthcare. The OECD average is 9.5% Health spending is almost entirley explained by income levels, especially in the long-run. The US spends much more because the US is much richer than most and because healt
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> Obesity is not an independent variable Nothing is perfect, but most experts believe this has little to do with healthcare today because healthcare interventions tend not to be effective causes of long-run weight loss and most countries
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> The obesity explanation doesn't pass the sniff test. Canada is 12% less obese than the U.S., but it spends 6% less of its GDP on healthcare. It's my blog (RCA). My argument is that obesity substantially explains US health o
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> a) many (perhaps the majority, don't have time to source now) of the bankruptcies in the US are due to medical issues and spending The vast majority of medical bankruptcies have nothing to do with the cost of medical care, but the
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by rcafdm 7y ago
I'm not a language zealot (most languages/frameworks come with pros and cons) and I use R and the tidyverse quite regularly, but "performant" is not a word I'd associate with the tidyverse. I'd be surprised
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> Yet 81 percent of the leading health economists agreed with the statement, “The primary reason for the increase in the health sector’s share of GDP over the past 30 years is technological change in medicine" I've highlighted
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by rcafdm 7y ago
Thanks. I haven't seriously considered that before, but I may put one up!
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> 1. You didn’t. https://i0.wp.com/randomcriticalanalysis.com/wp-content/uplo... > 2. Asymptotic growth towards 100% certainly sounds unsustainable. "Sounds" isn't an argument and I'm exp
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by rcafdm 7y ago
I (RCA) have been meaning to dedicate a blog post to this topic exclusively and quantify the root causes in considerable detail. In short, yes, I believe globalization and, specifically, multinational corporations (affiliates of foreign own
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by rcafdm 7y ago
The point is that almost all of what people have termed "medical bankruptcy" has approximately nothing to do with healthcare costs. It has to do with income/career disruption associated with their health, so these issues pla
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by rcafdm 7y ago
One can come up with a narrative to support almost any argument. The question is, do you have data to support it, is it credible, and how much can it actually explain? The truth is richer countries tend to be significantly fatter countr
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by rcafdm 7y ago
1, I can fit the US on a linear trend amongst high income countries. 2, there’s no necessary reason why increasing health share with rising real income is unsustainable. We can and have increased share spent on health while increasing rea
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by rcafdm 7y ago
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Obviously, healthcare must be paid for somehow and it’s a fair assumption workers bear most of the incidence. However, the role of real incomes and relative prices are generally under appreciated here.
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by rcafdm 7y ago
You absolutely can in real terms. https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2019/12/03/no-means-no-th... Also while I agree that 100% of a GDP is a reasonable approximation of an upper limit in practice, that&#x27
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by rcafdm 7y ago
My analysis strongly suggests costs strongly track with income levels. Relative Prices rise with income, but purchasing power also rises, so it's not necessarily less affordable relative to incomes actually earned domestically. htt
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by rcafdm 7y ago
Yes, I'm the author of the blog (RCA). No, I haven't studied this narrow question, though it's somewhat tangential to the arguments I've advanced (outcomes; prices; aggregate costs; etc). I have, however, seen several
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by rcafdm 7y ago
US also has "programs" and generally spends more on preventative medicine. Further, actual medical evidence suggests medicine doesn't have good treatments for obesity (getting people to lose much weight and keep it off), s
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by rcafdm 7y ago
The exact numbers depend on the source/methodology, but all credible estimates show large differences and these differences imply large effects for mortality rates [in the broader population]( https://randomcriticalanalysis.c
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by rcafdm 7y ago
No, but this is addressed in my post. Australia's obesity rate is substantially lower, plus they suffer from lower homicide, drug abuse, and the like. More generally, the diminishing returns to health spending imply there's very
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by rcafdm 7y ago
My point is that there's very little to suggest US healthcare is uniquely ineffective. There rapidly diminishing returns to health spending and US outcomes are badly handicapped by factors like obesity and homicide. Maybe try actual
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> That argument is either wrong or tautological. There are two distinct claims here. (1) National health expenditures are overwhelmingly determined by the resources available to households, as measured by consumption or disposable income
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by rcafdm 7y ago
> "Using average income, a clearly bad statistic, can't be justified by saying you could not find a good statistic." As lliamander already mentioned, I addressed this on my blog. Several quick points: 1) International co
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by rcafdm 8y ago
First, we can assess the degree to which the US is unusual by inspecting the scatter plot. If US household income was somehow unusually inflated by health spending, then it its residual should be much larger than it is (especially in bet
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by rcafdm 8y ago
P.S.: It’s my blog.
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by rcafdm 8y ago
It’s really not in this context. The median household vis-a-vis income isn’t necessarily the median household vis-a-vis health consumption. More generally, health spending is massively subsidized by society writ large. Society’s willingn
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by rcafdm 9y ago
But if you look carefully you will find most of this behavior plays out similarly in those few countries with somewhat more comparable wealth (e.g., Norway). The issues that many people think of as being particularly "American" p

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