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COPYRIGHT 2004 Thomson Financial Inc.
From pricing debates to state actions to ... oh, yeah, the Medicare legislation, the editors of M&H name our top stories of 2003 and the people who embody them.
* It's the prices, stupid. That's how Johns Hopkins University's Gerard Anderson and colleagues put the matter in the title of their May/June 2003 study in Health Affairs.
While concern over ever-rising spending was a main continuing theme of health-policy discussion in 2003, the year saw debate shift to prices--not just spending--as a key issue. Burgeoning debates over pricing involve not just the traditional scapegoat--prescription drugs--but also hospital prices, especially those charged to the uninsured. In an unusual twist for U.S. health-policy discussion, these debates have spurred Americans to look at health-care policies internationally.
The key points: Not everybody pays the same amount for a given health-care good or service, neither internationally nor within the United States. And many U.S. prices are higher than elsewhere, especially for the most vulnerable people--those who lack health insurance.
International price disparities span the whole range of health-care goods and services, Anderson and fellow economists argue. Analysis of 2000 data from 30 industrialized countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows "that the United States spends more on health care than any of the other OECD countries spend, without providing more services than the other countries do," they write. "This suggests that the difference in spending is mostly attributable to higher prices of goods and services."
Nevertheless, the top example making headlines in 2003 was the same on which rumblings have been heard for several years: Americans pay more--often much more--for prescription drugs than...
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