You mean that anesthesiologist that keeps you alive during surgery?
That gets paid more here than he or she would in any country on earth. I work in IT. My salary is not twice as much as it would be anywhere else on earth. If it was, the the IT industry would have a very distorting effect on our economy.
Let's say you have an individual market insurance premium of 14k a year for your family. Of that, about 800 dollars at the most is insurance industry profits. Where do you think the rest of that goes? It's providers. You have oncologists slowing down the rates of infusion just increase billing. You have plastic surgeons coming into ICU, doing a handful of facial stitches after trauma, and billing 20k for it. You got neurologists billing 5k for less than 5 minutes of their time glancing at a CT scan. You got an entire consulting industry that has cropped up in the last 20 years whose only purpose is to show providers how to increase their billing all the way to the legal line of fraud. My wife worked in insurance defense for nearly 20 years. She would pull records and billing all the time. You would not believe the kinds of things providers do when it comes to billing. If it were any other industry, we would call it fraud.
No one is arguing that specialists and providers should not be paid well. Of course they should be, but when you got orthopedic surgeons bringing in better than 800k a year when they would be making 400k a year in any other modern developed nation, someone is paying for that, and its you and me.
Everyone wants to blame insurers. I don't like insurance companies, but they are not the main problem here. People want to blame pharma, drugs are just 10% of over all health spending. Republicans push HSAs so you pay for your own routine care. I am all for HSAs, but routine care is only 7% of healthcare spending. Its nothing. That is why you can pay it out of an HSA.
Fully half of all healthcare markets in this country are provider monopolies where one health system owns all the providers at all levels in that market. Insurers have no ability to even negotiate prices in those markets, the providers charge what they want. Now, I am not saying that all providers are out there gouging consumers. That isn't the case at all, but some are, and what are you going to do about it? You going to tell the cancer hospital, "No, I don't want to pay 80k a month for cancer treatment, just let me die a horrible death.". You going to tell the cardiologist "No, I don't want a 150k heart surgery, just me die.". Hell, you have severe trauma and spend better than 100k before you are even conscious. The normal laws of supply and demand do not work in such a system. It's not like going out and buying a car and forgoing the purchase if it is too expensive. If you need catastrophic or chronic care, which are the biggest drivers of high healthcare costs, the choice is either pay what the provider tells you and your insurer to pay, or die. That is why no one wants our system. No country on earth wants our healthcare system. Anyone else on earth could do it the way we do it here and no one wants to. There is a reason for that, and part of it is 800k a year anesthesiologists.
