To heal our ailing health care system, we need to stop thinking like Americans. That's the message of two articles by UCLA's Dr. Marc Nuwer, a leading expert on national health care reform.
The United States boasts the world's most expensive health care system, yet only one-sixth of Americans are insured. Medical expenditures exceed $2 trillion annually, making health care the economy's largest sector, four times bigger than national defense.
By 2015, the U.S. government is projected to spend $4 trillion on health care, or 20 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.
An aging population will boost spending. Half of Medicare costs support very sick people in their last stages of life, and experts estimate that Medicare funds will be exhausted by 2018.
31 percent of U.S. health care funds go toward administration. "We push a lot of paper," Nuwer says. "We spend twice as much as Canada, which has a more streamlined health care system that demands doctors complete less paperwork."
10 percent of U.S. expenses are spent on "defensive medicine" — pricey tests ordered by doctors afraid of missing anything, however unlikely.
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