zlacker

the overutilization story is what explains this, you cannot simply walk into Switzerland and say "I want an MRI here is my $138", but that is essentially what you can do (delta a bit of doctor shopping) in the US. there also is a lot of bad price transparency in the US so the listed price is not the price ended up paying, again this is due to the problem I identified above about shielding costs.

>>whimsi+(OP)
When's the last time you tried that here in the US?

It's like when people claim that other countries have worse medical systems because they have to wait, as if my friend didn't just wait 2 months for a simple injection recently, and my mom isn't waiting 2 weeks for an MRI after a stroke.

The vast majority of people who insist we have the greatest healthcare don't even go to the doctor's regularly. Because they were raised in a system where going to the doctor is something you have to weigh the cost of! We have worse medical outcomes simply because people wait until a cheap situation turns into a shitty and painful and expensive situation.

>>mrguyo+24
What country has more doctor visits?

>>mrguyo+24
i don't think we disagree that much to be honest. i just think that a lot of the issues you are identifying (like long wait time for critical care) are due to price insensitivity due to insurance & overutilization. ie. every MRI my parents have is one that contributes to inflexibility in scheduling for truly urgent cases and also raises the price for those urgent cases.

human intensive things like medical care are characterized by diseconomies to scale when viewed from the whole industry perspective and baumol cost disease. overutilization makes the problem much worse

>>s1arti+Jj
I went to check and apparently South Koreans have the most visits and there are 20+ countries that have more than US.