To almost every claim that the American healthcare system is overpriced, defenders of the United States can point to the comparison problem—it is not fair to compare American surgeons, or hospitals, to our peers in Europe when American surgeons and hospitals are not the same as in those other countries. Our surgeons are better trained, the defenders retort, and our hospitals offer higher quality care. When quality measures suggest otherwise, defenders can point to the inherent difficulty of measuring quality while adequately adjusting for the severity of patients’ underlying illnesses. Comparing American healthcare institutions to those in Europe is like comparing apples to oranges (with America representing the apple portion of that comparison, of course – nothing more American than God, baseball and apple pie!).
A study of drug prices in the U.S. and Europe published last spring avoids the apples to oranges problem, and provides compelling evidence that we have a real price problem here in the U.S.
The researchers looked at medication prescriptions between 2005 and 2010 in six countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. They only studied branded drugs, ones which were still under patent protection. And they limited their study to the 68 most popular drugs, which made up about half of all prescriptions over that time.
And what did they find?… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)
