MEDICAL GROWING TRENDS HAS OVERSEAS TRAVELS IN MIND

...According to a chart report from the AMA Council on Medical Services showed that operations on hip replacements, and heart by-passess surgeries cost 10 time more in the United States than in other countries. [...] Some insurance companies are starting to pay for operations oversees as well. ...

Most medical procedures cost an "arm and a leg" here as compared to other parts of the world... it's called Capitalism. People pay with their flesh literally and figuratively here in the States for most things, but Capitalist greed attempt to instill fear in the masses to keep us from seeking what makes financial sense like medications from overseas and such. Hopefully with the Lipitor now being available in generic form which has brought the price of that drug down astronomically... that the pharmaceutical industry will have no choice but to lower costs of drugs in order to stay competitive or people should go in droves to buy meds overseas to send a resonating message to these Capitalist entities.

Why Does Health Care Cost So Much in the United States?
November 25, 2011

Different costs for the same procedure in 2009. Staying healthy in the United States is expensive. In fact, in 2009, the average annual cost of health care was $7,960 per person -- two and a half times what it was in Japan for the same year.

That's just one of the numbers we pored over in the new report out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which compared health care costs across all 34 of its members. The report illustrates significant variation between costs in different countries.

But there were also some commonalities. Health spending has grown more quickly than GDP in the last decade in all of the member countries, except in Luxembourg.

And, Health at a Glance 2011 shows that obesity rates have doubled or even tripled in many countries since 1980. In more than half of OECD countries, 50 percent or more of the population is now overweight, if not obese. The obesity rate in the adult population is highest in the United States -- rising from 15 percent in 1980 to 34 percent in 2008 -- and lowest in Japan and South Korea, at 4 percent. The differences in cost of health care aren't anything new.

Frontline produced a documentary on the subject, "Sick Around the World" in 2008, which you can view here. So what are some of the reasons that health care costs more in the United States? Are we healthier because of it? We posed a few of these key questions to Matthias Rumpf from the OECD earlier this week. Answers have been edited for space and clarity. ...

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