U.S. health spending on pace to hit $6T

tencentshill

$16,500 per person is insane. Someone is charging way too much for goods and services, and someone is paying it with no questions asked.

Bender

How much of that spending is continuously treating symptoms vs. finding and curing root causes? At what point do the pentagon and other agencies step in and treat this like an unsustainable existential threat to the country?

brandonb

IMO, there's an interesting opportunity for AI to make healthcare deflationary. For example, Medicare is launching a new program in July that pays a fixed rate for achieving defined outcomes, like lowering blood pressure or cholesterol. Medicare's explicit goal here is to create incentives to automate the repetitive parts of care delivery with software. (Much of preventive cardiology is surprisingly algorithmic and guideline-driven, so this is more plausible than it seems.) This reverses the incentives of the current system, where CPT codes incentivize doing more "stuff" (but not necesarily delivering the most effective care efficiently). If you're a software engineer who cares about health, and have been sitting on the sidelines till now, I think the next few years are a really interesting time to make a contribution.

downrightmike

Surprised a healthcare CEO hasn't tried to bribe the gov to just let them be the only game in town.

androiddrew

The plan to extract as much wealth as possible out of families with members near end of life is showing excellent results.

bhelkey

The US spent $2 Trillion dollars on Medicare and Medicaid in 2024 [1][2]. If the US spent this money as efficiently as Japan (or UK [3], ...) it could pay for Healthcare for every single resident with this $2 Trillion dollars. [1] https://www.kff.org/medicaid/medicaid-financing-the-basics/#... [2] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-medicare-cost-the... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy7zvp5xrqo