It All Comes Down to $$

The two articles had very interesting yet different approaches to health care spending in the U.S. I do agree that new technologies that make a significant impact on improving diseases is quite costly and at the same time worth it. Just as technology becomes more affordable with computers, cell phones, etc. I feel that over time, treatments for conditions like heart attacks will also be reduced in price. As long as there is competition in the market, companies will produce cheaper and more efficient technologies. Other countries also treat the same conditions that we do and they are not always in a deficit from it.

It is quite astonishing to realize the amount of money wasted in health care from the estimates that Pricewaterhouse Cooper provided. I can not believe that $420 billion is spent on defensive medicine and insurance claims alone. Though this is a huge inefficiency, I wonder what the U.S. could even set in place to significantly reduce this amount without re-structuring our entire health care system.

In a related issue of costs from Obama's speech (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/09/obama-health-care-speech_n_281265.html), he speaks of how reducing inefficiency in Medicare and other aspects will help fund for his new $900 billion plan. He also said that if health care's rising costs are cut by just .10% (less than 1%) that it would save $4 trillion in the long run. I'm not sure how long the 'long run' is exactly, but that is an absolutely astonishing figure.

So all in all, these talks of reducing costs seem to relate to either cutting the quality of health care for patients or reducing waste. I doubt that we would want to reduce treatments for life saving technology no matter how expensive the best care is. So how do we exactly go about cutting waste??