Via Ezra Klein at the Washington Post comes something Klein learned from a talk with Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson. In it he received a bunch of charts from the International Federation of Health Plans that actually compared health care prices between countries. The long and short of it? We pay more because we choose to pay more on every unit of health care there is. If were to pay Canadian prices, we'd cut health care costs by 50%. If we were to pay Medicare prices (you'll note those are represented by the 'USA low-end' part of the charts) we'd drastically cut costs.
The end result? Well, basically we just had a health care debate and health care bill that failed to seriously address price differentials and cost controls. In other words, more specifically in the words of George Halvorson, "A health-care debate in this country that isn't aware of the price differential is not an informed debate." But you already knew we didn't have an informed debate, didn't you?
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