Healthcare: Where the Money Goes

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Why does healthcare cost so much in the U.S.? Well, we typically rely less on hospital care and more on outpatient care than most countries, so you might expect that we pay less for hospital care and more for outpatient care. But you’d only be half right. Even though we use less hospital care we still pay more for it than most countries. And since we use more outpatient care we pay a lot more for it:

The fact that we’re spending so much on outpatient care isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Same day surgery does cost less in general that longer inpatient stays. But it’s undeniable that the incentives in the system to financially reward quicker and less invasive procedures have increased their use. The financial rewards are much more for outpatient than inpatient care, and the fee-for-service mechanisms of the US encourage the use of more care.

….So here’s our first bit of depressing news. The single biggest contributor to the money we’re spending that’s “extra” is for medical care. It’s not a company or a crook. It’s for actual stuff that we seem to value. I will get into some of the specifics of this in future posts, but the bottom line is that when we talk about cutting spending, we will need to talk about reducing this amount. Especially since, if we were spending so much on care, we should expect to see impressive returns in quality (which we don’t).

The introduction to Aaron’s series on the cost of medical care is here, including links to each post in the series. It’ll be finished up on October 1.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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