The greatest health care in the world? Only if by "greatest" we mean "most expensive."

Courtesy of New York Times:  

Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray for allergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy. 

While the United States medical system is famous for drugs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and heroic care at the end of life, it turns out that a more significant factor in the nation’s $2.7 trillion annual health care bill may not be the use of extraordinary services, but the high price tag of ordinary ones. “The U.S. just pays providers of health care much more for everything,” said Tom Sackville, chief executive of the health plans federation and a former British health minister. 

Colonoscopies offer a compelling case study. They are the most expensive screening test that healthy Americans routinely undergo — and often cost more than childbirth or an appendectomy in most other developed countries. Their numbers have increased manyfold over the last 15 years, with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting that more than 10 million people get them each year, adding up to more than $10 billion in annual costs. 

Largely an office procedure when widespread screening was first recommended, colonoscopies have moved into surgery centers — which were created as a step down from costly hospital care but are now often a lucrative step up from doctors’ examining rooms — where they are billed like a quasi operation. They are often prescribed and performed more frequently than medical guidelines recommend. 

The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.

One of the primary ways that the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare if you rather, was going to bring down the cost of health care, was by introducing competition into the system that would force hospitals and doctors to reduce the costs of many of the medical procedures.

I have always believed that THAT was what was driving a lot of the blowback from both doctors and health insurance companies. The sweetheart deals that they and the pharmaceutical companies have forged have made them all filthy rich, while bankrupting hard working Americans by the thousands.

If people REALLY understood how Obamacare was going to affect our access to reasonably priced insurance and health care moving forward there would be NO average citizen in the country that would not be all for it.

And those who remained against it would only be the Republicans who realized that their political careers were over once people understood what the bill would do for them, and that THEY had done everything in their power to stop it from being implemented, and the greedy medical professionals who are unwilling to give up those huge checks.

Personally I am looking forward to the day when we can do away with insurance companies altogether and have universal health care for all.  You know it's coming, I just hope it arrives in my lifetime.