What Is Driving Up the Cost 0f Healthcare in America?

A bit simplistic perhaps but should we not also consider the corresponding growth of earnings (profit) in critical providers of services: the pharmaceutical industry, for-profit hospital companies, healthcare insurance groups. 

Bottom line is that we have morphed the multifactorial healthcare enterprise from one in which many of its components were previously focused on providing necessary and at times critical services and products for public good to one of providing profits for shareholders. 

A number of pharmaceutical companies were once family owned or directed by a foundation; hospitals were community owned and managed; many insurers were not-for-profit. Our healthcare system was based on reacting to the needs of sick people; now it is reacting to Wall Street and what it “expects”.

Can we not try to understand that there may well be some components of our economy that should not be viewed from a venture capital perspective? If not, then we must accede that the cost of healthcare will continue to increase because it must; that is the premise of how both publicly traded companies and those managed by private investors operate

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The main objective of all such companies is to provide a return for their investors notwithstanding the means that may need to be employed to achieve their projected earnings. Healthcare is no longer a concept or an ideal; it has become a product no different in the eyes of the investment community than any other product based industry. The result is that profit has replaced quality as the primary goal. 

One only has to ask why we have the highest cost of healthcare in multiples over other developed nations and yet the non-business related outcomes, i.e., the overall quality of patient outcomes as reflected by long established standards such as life expectancy and infant mortality falls far short. 

We continue to be told that our healthcare is the finest in the world. That simply is not the case if looked at across the whole of our nation. We mandate education for children and have laws to compel parents to enroll their children in schools and provide the schools for that purpose. We do not provide the same access for healthcare. It comes with a price tag. 

We see education as an entitlement as it is appreciated as critical to the future of the country. We do not see healthcare in a similar manner with the result that the same children who are afforded education often do not have adequate healthcare provision.

The why is simple. We fail to recognize healthcare as a basic right of citizenship and rather see it as a benefit that may or may not be provided. No other developed country holds that belief. 

Can this conviction be changed? The question must first be is this even feasible in America with the increasing dominance of publicly traded healthcare groups and the influence they ostensibly exercise over elected public officials from State Houses to Washington DC.