The High Cost of Health Care
June 12th, 2009, 1:22am by JakeNow for something completely different. I’ve been meaning to read this New Yorker article for over a week about the high cost of health care in McAllen, Texas. It really is worth spending the 30-40 minutes it takes to plow through– probably easier on a Kindle than MacBook Pro. Lots of good stuff, here’s my favorite excerpt:
Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coˆrdination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the countryís best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isnít going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.
The thrust of the article is simple– medicine is more expensive in some places because of over utilization. But it’s definitely worth reading to better understand why this has happened.