It’s easy to bash the American healthcare system and point out instances where it’s lacking.\u00c2\u00a0 To me, it seems to be more about billing systems than medicine.\u00c2\u00a0 A friend told me about his experience in France, where he, as a foreigner, was seen and treated by a doctor at his hotel, and upon trying to pay was dismissed: “You Americans, always wanting to pay for things.”\u00c2\u00a0 Yeah, they pay high taxes and don’t typically have single family homes, cars or enormous flatscreen TVs.\u00c2\u00a0 They also seem to generally believe in their government.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas Americans like to euphemise imperfection as “good enough for government purposes.”<\/p>\n
Anyway, if you care about the balance of costs versus quality of care, you should check out this article in the New Yorker about how a small town in Texas has one of the highest healthcare costs per person<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I found it a well-written article that’s chock-full of helpful tidbits for your next healthcare debate at a bar, cocktail party, cafe, or late-night dorm room philosophizing session. Another: ” Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quality ranking tended to be.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s easy to bash the American healthcare system and point out instances where it’s lacking.\u00c2\u00a0 To me, it seems to be more about billing systems than medicine.\u00c2\u00a0 A friend told me about his experience in France, where he, as a …<\/p>\n
\nHere’s one tidbit from the article:\u00c2\u00a0 “In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars.”<\/p>\n