I have blogged on this point before, but now I am going to try to expand in more detail. My title is "medial affordability index", but we know that no single index can do the job. For that reason, I will be coming up with several different indexes to see if we can get a better understanding of why the USA spends so much more than the rest of the world on medical cost. If you think about the problem, it is not the actual cost of medical that is our problem, it is "affordability". I once discussed with a friend the fact that Champagne cost so much and the person responded that, "it does not cost much if you can afford it". That stuck with me and now I will show how it. also, applies to our "high" medical costs.
To make any index meaningful, you need something to compare it with. For this blog, I am going to use as many countries as I can find data for that have an equal or better health care out come. The main measure of out come will be life expectancy. I would use something else, but I don't know what it would be. I think that many of you will be surprised that there are about 35 countries in the world who have longer life expectancies than the USA and all spend less as a percentage of their GNP and in absolute numbers. I think that this is going to be interesting if I can research and find good data. I could also look at data from countries who have shorter life spans, but I feel that meaningful conclusions would be hard to draw and be acceptable by my readers.
The first index that I am going to explore is the average and median compensation of doctors as a ratio of the average and median income of "families". I could have used GNP, but in the limit, they should both yield the same answer.
The second index that I will explore is the cost of a day in the hospital with the same criteria as above.
The third index that I will explore is cost of selected medical procedures. I know that this one may get a little complicated, but I feel that I can structure it so that an acceptable conclusion can be reached.
The fourth index that I will explore will be the cost to "produce" a doctor including education and residency cost. I am sure that I will have problems with definitions, but I think that I can do it.
The fifth index will be the percentage of doctor in practice who were born in the given country. I will try to make this a measure of the ability of a country to produce its own doctors.
I may have more indexes before this is over, but here goes!!!!
