As it stands now, U.S. healthcare will bankrupt the nation and doom it to permanent stagnation and recession.

That healthcare alone is dooming the U.S. economy is not news to Of Two Minds readers, as I have been covering the catastrophic consequences of our runaway healthcare system for the past decade.

Three charts crystallize the healthcare dynamics that are dooming the U.S. economy. The first depicts the runaway growth of healthcare costs–a rapid expansion that is a permanent feature of U.S. healthcare, regardless of which party is in office or what reforms are instituted.

This expansion of costs has many drivers, most of which result from the system’s perverse incentives for fraud, overbilling, marginal treatments and defensive medicine. Technological and medical advances offer more options for treatment, and can push costs up–but advances can just as readily push costs down, too.

The primary drivers of rapidly increasing costs are: Get a Job, Build a Rea... Charles Hugh Smith Best Price: $7.99 Buy New $13.99 (as of 02:30 UTC - Details)

1. The cartel/crony-capitalist structure of U.S. healthcare

2. Defensive medicine to stave off litigation

3. Profiteering from needless or ineffective tests, procedures and medications

4. Fraud and overbilling

5. The concentration of expenditures in a small sector of the population

6. America’s inability and/or unwillingness to have an adult discussion over end-of-life care for the elderly.

Here is a chart of the rising cost of U.S. healthcare, which is far outstripping the growth of GDP, which is another way of saying healthcare costs are outstripping our ability to pay for healthcare.

Doctoring Data: How to... Dr Malcolm Kendrick Best Price: $17.00 Buy New $16.99 (as of 07:45 UTC - Details) Other advanced nations pay for universal healthcare with 8%-9% of their GDP, where the U.S. spends 18% of GDP on less-than-universal healthcare. How do other advanced countries provide healthcare for all for less than half of what America spends per person (per capita)?

Other advanced nations do not spend gargantuan sums on the elderly and end-of-life care. Please look carefully at this chart. No one with any knowledge of life in Sweden or Germany would declare their care of the elderly barbarous, yet somehow Sweden’s cost of care actually declines as the elderly approach the end of their lives, while the cost of care for the elderly skyrockets in the U.S.

Is medical care that different technologically in the U.S. and Sweden, or is it the difference between a system that is rational and one that is based on extracting the maximum profit from delivering whatever the government will pay for?

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The Best of Charles Hugh Smith

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