Thanks to kos for the tweet:RT @ezraklein: These are the best health care charts I've ever found. And I'm a connoisseur of health care charts.
Ezra Klein
On Friday, I sat down with Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson to talk about health-care reform. The conversation was long and ranging and will take a while to transcribe. But before we really got into the weeds, Halvorson handed me an astonishing packet of charts. The material was put together by the International Federation of Health Plans, which is pretty much what it sounds like: an association of insurance plans in different countries. But it showed something I've never seen before, at least not at this level of detail: prices.
the above is Ezra quoted from his article.
Ezra from the Wapo:
The health-care reform debate has done a good job avoiding the subject of prices. The argument over the Medicare-attached public plan was, in a way that most people didn't understand, an argument about prices, but it quickly became an argument about a public option without a pricing dimension, and never really looked back. The administration has been very interested in the finding that some states are better at providing cost-effective care than other states, but not in the finding that some countries are better at purchasing care than other countries. "A health-care debate in this country that isn't aware of the price differential is not an informed debate," says Halvorson. By that measure, we have not had a very informed debate.
Now here are the realities of Health Care costs and where our energies and focus should be.
Hum, do you see any pattern here? Anything earth shaking, obvious?
In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn't set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you'll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers.
Well if you are really curious and need any more charts to aid in your telephone calls to your Congress People here you go:
Ezra - WaPo
And here for the charts provided by:
International Federation of Health Plans
Thank you for your attention! :)
footnotes for PDF report... see all three pages