SUMMARY HEALTH COSTS AND MEDICAL BANKRUPTCIES

CEOs of hospital complexes and specialists in medicine tend to earn exorbitant salaries (http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/06/hospital-ceo-compensation.html), but as high as hospital CEO and physicians salaries are, they constitute only about 7% of health care spending!*  Is it any wonder that health costs are so high?

And then there are organ transplants.  This whole thing was stimulated by the 10 yr old girl whose parents through a law suit pushed her to the head of the class to get an adult lung transplant.  A child doesn't get a whole lung.  The lungs come in lobes (five total for both lungs to be exact), and she is listed as getting a double lung transplant (i.e. two lobes) in a six hour operation.  The average cost of a double lung transplant is estimated to be $797,300   I doubt that most of the people that get a lung transplant or their families can pay this, and it is not clear how many are covered to some extent by health insurance either.  And a lung transplant is by no means the highest cost organ transplant which is one you don't hear much about - an intestine transplant that goes over a million dollars, but including all the costs, a heart-double lung transplant is right up there, over a million dollars also (http://www.transplantliving.org/before-the-transplant/financing-a-transplant/the-costs/).  Is it any wonder that health costs are so high?

The average cost of a premature baby is given as $40,000.  An important matter here is that deliveries of  premature babies are increasing because cesarean-section births are becoming more common.  Of course, the  cost of a premature baby can vary wildly depending on the complications.  A case mentioned a cost over $2 million of which the parents share was $450,000, and they had to declare bankruptcy. (http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/06/costs-and-problems-of-premature-babies.html)  Is it any wonder that health costs are so high?

All these things are very expensive but WebMD states that the biggest cost in medicine is heart disease at $107.2 billion, followed by injuries, cancer, mental disorders, COPD and asthma, joint disorders, diabetes, high blood pressure, back problems, and high cholesterol at $37.2 billion. (http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/disability-cost-13/slideshow-medical-expenses)  The total of these 11 conditions total $652.2 billion.

Overall, The U.S. paid about 17.9% of its GDP on health care in 2011, the most of any high income country, beating out Switzerland, France, Germany and Belgium (the top five in 2006).  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png)

Indeed, it has been multiply cited that nearly half of personal bankruptcies (46.2%) in the U.S. are caused by a major medical reason (http://www.factcheck.org/2008/12/health-care-bill-bankruptcies/) A category that includes "any medical bankruptcy" (addiction, uncontrolled gambling, child birth, or death in the family) raises the figure to 54.5%.  When a hospital gets "stiffed," who makes up the difference?   Is it any wonder that health costs are so high?

* http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/physician-fees-and-salaries-in-the-us-and-other-countries/