I would like to take a moment to praise the Obama administration for having the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) release this huge database of what different hospitals charge for common procedures. The New York Times was given a preview of the data and put together a few examples of the widely divergent and [...]

The International Federation of Health Plans is out with their new comparative price report for 2012 and it again shows the United States radically overpays for basically every health care service relative to any other first-world country. From the report: The report looks at a wide range of procedures, treatments and drugs, but those charts are essentially [...]

M.I.T. Economist Jonathan Gruber continues to leave people radically less informed about the real health care cost issue in this country with public statements that frankly make no sense. The latest example is from a Washington Post article about Massachusetts’ attempts to control health care cost. “Cost control isn’t easy,” said M.I.T. economist Jon Gruber, [...]

American health care continues to get more expensive, but the increase is driven by us getting overcharged more for the same services and not by us utilizing more health care. This is a key finding of a new Health Care Cost Institute report on 2010 health care costs. Rising prices for care were the chief [...]

Robert J. Samuelson writes an extremely disappointing  and misleading article about health care policy in today’s Washington Post. The column starts out fine with Samuelson looking at the basic OECD data that shows America spends dramatically more on health care than any other industrialized country on earth but doesn’t get better health outcomes as a [...]

The United Kingdom and Ireland, both countries which have what could only be considered socialize medicine programs, also have the two most cost effective health care systems in the developed world according a study in the Journal of Royal Society of Medicine. From the study: The biggest ratios, indicating the greatest cost-effectiveness, were in Ireland, [...]

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has released a new report that indicates Gov. Deval Patrick’s goal of controlling health care cost by moving the state towards a global payment method is unlikely to produce real savings.

Another problem for Romney-care. Even with an individual mandate private insurers in Massachusetts costs to consumers rise faster than public plans. How much more evidence do we need that single payer health care is the only affordable way to go?

Massachusetts is still struggling with controlling health care costs since it decided to embrace health care reform by just expanding our broken private insurance system to cover more people. A problem in Massachusetts, which is common around the country, is that there are huge variances in what is paid for the same procedure. From the [...]

As you can see in this helpful chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation, America pays much more for health care than any other first-world country. There are a lot of false ideas or very minor explanations that are overstated to try to justify why we pay so much. Other countries are just evil nations that [...]