Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They've lowered costs only by cutting or rationing them.
Medical costs are of concern, both in developing and developed countries.
I believe a nation does not maximize its health care until it starts to ask the hard question: How can we prioritize our expenditures to buy the most health care for the most people? We should not apologize for rationing; we should promote it and advance it.
In mid-May, the House of Representatives approved the full amount of money that the Veterans Administration said was needed for next year - plus an additional $1 billion increase for veterans' health care.
The Affordable Care Act is a public-policy flop of epic proportions.
Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life... Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.
Prescription drugs today represent 60¢ on every dollar spent for health care. Ten years ago it was only 10¢.
Sometimes it seems President Obama lives in a parallel universe where facts are floating around to be plucked out of suspended animation. Never more so than on the effects of the Affordable Care Act.
Somebody's going to pay for health coverage for the American people, and the question is, how do you do that?
We do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount and, on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.
Since the 1960s, there has been a tremendous expansion of the resources available to pay for health care.
The wellness and prevention market will outgrow the health care market.
We can only imagine what would happen to our health care and to the quality of our health care here in North Dakota if we took the federal government out of health care.
People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.
President Obama famously promised that the Affordable Care Act would not only slow the growth in health care costs, but would also reverse these trends, making the average health insurance plan cheaper. That isn't happening.
I'm no health care expert, but you've got technology that constantly advances the ability to extend life and maybe improve lifestyle. That puts constant upward pressure on health care costs.
First of all, pharmaceutical costs are the single fastest-growing part of our health care budget.
The fastest-growing part of the Pentagon's budget are health care expenses.
Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.
Just 10 percent of the population—mainly the elderly—consumes about 80 percent of health care expenditures, primarily on expensive chronic illnesses and end-of-life costs. Historically, the longer lives that medical advances have given us have run exactly parallel to the increase in chronic illness and the explosion in costs. Can we afford to live longer—much less radically longer?
In many cases, an expansion of Medicaid will not only drive taxpayer costs but will deliver lower-quality care than what they have today.
Economic security can vanish in an instant without health security.
But if you - if what - the reports are true, what they're saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that's going to increase our costs, we knew that.
The small businesses that I've talked to have consistently said that the cost of health care is one of the things that they need the most help with.
By the Obama administration's reasoning, it would be constitutionally permissible to make Americans purchase nearly any product (broccoli, gym membership) that improved their health and thereby contributed to lower health-care costs.
