A new study from the Business Roundtable shows the United States’ five leading competitors spend, on average, 63 cents for every dollar that U.S. employers and workers spend on health care, and emerging competitors Brazil, India and China spend only 15 cents.
In addition, on a weighted scale, the United States gets 23 percent less for its health care dollars than Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France do, on average, and 46 percent less than Brazil, India and China, the study shows.
“Health care costs are one of the top cost pressures facing American businesses today, inhibiting job creation and hurting America’s ability to compete in global markets,” said Harold McGraw III, chairman of the Business Roundtable and chairman, president and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Cos. “This study helps us understand the relationship between spending, quality and competitiveness, while enabling us to track progress as we push forward with health care reform.”
The Business Roundtable is an association of CEOs whose companies provide health care for more than 35 million Americans. The study combines internationally reported measures covering both spending on, and the performance of, national health care systems to assign a value to the U.S. health care system compared with important global competitors.
To measure health care spending as it relates to economic competitiveness, the study looked at employer-paid benefits per hour in manufacturing (the U.S. industry most exposed to exports), and a broader measure of GDP-adjusted per capita health care spending, which encompasses spending financed through taxes paid by both employers and employees.
The study gauged the outcomes produced by that spending by 17 commonly used measures, including life expectancy, mortality in general and for cancer, heart disease, injuries and non-communicable diseases, and the prevalence of obesity, diabetes and other diseases.
“This study shows a significant health care value gap,” said Ivan Seidenberg, chair of the Business Roundtable’s Consumer Health and Retirement Initiative and chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications.
“While, in many respects, the employer-based health care system in the United States is the best in the world – we have groundbreaking scientific advances, cutting-edge medical technology, and exceptional doctors and medical institutions – the business model supporting it doesn’t meet Americans’ needs,” he added. “When we spend more to get less, we all lose – workers, employers and the government. The study points to a serious need for health care reform that puts customers in the center and uses the power of the market to lower costs, improve quality, create more consumer choice and expand accessibility.”
The study includes a policy agenda built on four “pillars”:
The Business Roundtable is an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies. Together, their companies have $5 trillion in annual revenue, represent nearly a third of the value of the U.S. stock market, employ nearly 10 million workers, and make charitable donations of more than $7 million per year. Additional information, including the full research report, can be found at www.BusinessRoundtable.org.
A modernized health plan: Supporting cost management and the employee experience.
The Surest health plan came from a group of innovators wondering: What if health care…
Learn More
The problem with health care in the US — and the health of our citizens — is fivefold:
1) The Cost of Health Insurance. Every dollar spent on “managing” care is a dollar taken away from actually providing care. Health insurance that covers everything — from the cost of a doctor’s visit to major surgery will by definition be absurdly expensive. At the same time, insured patients have no motivation or reason to shop for the best prices for care (e.g., diagnostic tests) or to negotiate prices directly with providers. In short, there is little or no market pressure on healthcare providers themselves directly by the recipients of services (i.e., patients).
2) What Doctors Know. Too many members of our medical profession know just what the pharmaceutical companies have told them. I have more trust in Columbian drug lords, who at least do not pretend to be anything but what they are. Big Pharma is invested in “creating” new drugs — many of which do not work better than old ones, and most of which have extensive side effects. In many many cases, patients could be helped — and less hurt –by changes in diet or lifestyle. Witness the many cases of unnecessary deaths caused by accepted and heavily marketed drugs for diseases like arthritis in the past few years. (Some studies have shown that arthritis can be successfully managed with changes in diet.)
3) Lack of Primary Care Physicians. There are simply not enough, and the current healthcare system will continue to dissuade medical students from becoming primary care physicians. This is one of the reasons why Massachusetts’ healthcare experiment is really NOT working — patients must wait far too long to see a physician for a referral or treatment.
4) Food Versus Drugs. Americans will pay exorbitant costs for healthcare but don’t want to pay to eat high quality food — the very stuff which fuels our organisms. Many of those countries that have lower health care costs also have populations that are willing to pay more to eat fresh food that is not full of antibiotics, growth hormones (known to cause cancer) or pesticides. Then we must deal with the meat lobbies — which encourage us to eat meat whose production has not been adequately regulated or inspected — to our great danger. Until people are willing to pay more to eat quality food we will have preventable epidemics of diseases like heart disease and diabetes.
5) “Alternative” and Preventive Health Care. The following have all been shown to have preventive or direct benefits for many health issues: massage, chiropractic, acupuncture, acupressure, etc. However, such services are provided by small businesses with little room to support large corporate overhead/profits, and therefore they have not gained a strong foothold in this country, despite their effectiveness.
Good luck to us all.