New peak for US health care spending: $10,345 per person | Hacker News Reader

New peak for US health care spending: $10,345 per person

washingtonpost.com

7 pointsZoeZoeBee5 comments

The government has probably spent $150,000 to $200,000 hurting my girlfriend since last September. She's less functional now, on psychiatric drugs, than she was over the 2015 labor day weekend (when she decided to quit using the street pharmacy cold-turkey).

I've recently come to appreciate that the psychiatrists' drugs - "anti-psychotics" and anxiety medications - actually create the conditions they treat. "Iatrogenic Psychosis" - I wonder what the ICD-10 code for that is. (technically the term is 'supersensitivity psychosis': http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3736929/ )

She was doing pretty well, until she got the SSRI antidepressant she thought she needed. This caused rapid heartbeat, which led to anxiety. She took her last anxiety pill, "fell apart", and the system got hold of her again.

Can someone clarify this, because the article does an incredibly shitty job of doing this? Is it talking about an average government spending of $10,345 over the life of each person in the U.S.?

No. The number also includes money spent by individual Americans, and it is per year, not over the life of (that would be incredibly low, at less than half a dollar a day)

Government spending is about a third of that, it seems (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_health_care_spending_...)

According to the article that fraction is increasing:

"Medicare and Medicaid are expected to grow more rapidly than private insurance as the baby-boom generation ages. By 2025, government at all levels will account for nearly half of health care spending, 47 percent."

(Note that that is "at all levels". I guess that includes expenditures by states)

"National health expenditures will hit $3.35 trillion this year, which works out to $10,345 for every man, woman and child."

This is over $10,000 per person on health care costs in one year.

Yes but as the article points out the distribution is highly skewed: "About 5 percent of the population — those most frail or ill — accounts for nearly half the spending in a given year, according to a separate government study. Meanwhile, half the population has little or no health care costs, accounting for 3 percent of spending."

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