Highly unlikely. The bulk of our health care spen...

2005-10-10T12:20:00.000-05:00

Highly unlikely. The bulk of our health care spending is at the end of life, not the beginning. If anything like this explains some of the disparity in health care spending between the US and other industrialized countries, it's that we spend "too much" prolonging the last few months of life.

Howard Dean had a great answer to a question about medical costs, at a town hall forum in New Hampshire two years ago, where he dealt with this. But I can't find my copy of the audio or transcription.

Of course the other huge problem with how we pay for medicine is our ridiculous privatized system, where insurance companies pay people to figure out how much care they can deny other people, and mediate doctor-patient relationships in an adversarial fashion; where businesses negotiate one by one for health care service for their employees and the self-employed have to do it on their own... there's so much overhead I don't think it can be measured. The effects of having so many competing interests at cross-purposes trying to deliver something that everyone needs, are staggering. Perhaps it employs more people than a single payer system would, but I doubt that's worth the drag on the entire economy that it causes, even in pure economic terms.

Compared to these things, what we spend on prenatal care as a country probably doesn't even get to "a drop in a pond" level. Well, okay, it probably does :)

Comments on The Sensible Knave: Prenatal and Neonatal Care

Highly unlikely. The bulk of our health care spen...