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0 pointsrcafdm9y ago0 comments

Right, it's just a coincidence that disposable income correlates nearly perfectly with health expenditures at a national level in the long run (and quite well at a subnational level) and that when disposable income falls NHE tracks it and so on and so forth.

P.S., I wrote the blog post.

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akamaka9y ago· 2 in thread

Perhaps that indicates how effective the healthcare industry in the US is at maximizing their revenue. If the choice is paying or dying, people will pay an unlimited amount.

rcafdmOP9y ago

Except the rich and poor spend pretty similarly in the US and elsewhere. The income elasticity > 1 occurs at a national level....

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/EC496/SOURCES/LUXURY.PDF

And the better data on price suggests US actually isn't unusually expensive for a high income country and so on and so forth. Much data points to higher volumes of health goods and services as we chase diminishing returns as a society.

akamaka9y ago

I meant my comment about unlimited spending as an philosphical argument, not as a literal data point.

And yes, the biggest problem in the US is unneccessary tests, procedures, drug consumption, etc., and the cause of that problem is a system which is built around maximizing revenue instead of maximizing public health.

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