Austin Frakt: Reagan, Deregulation and America's Exceptional Rise in Health Care Costs: "Why did American health care costs start skyrocketing compared with those of other advanced nations starting in the early 1980s?...
...At the same time this was happening, American longevity gains were failing to keep up with peer countries.... The United States didn’t impose the same types of government cost controls on health care that other nations did, and we invested less in social programs that also promote health.... The 1980s divergence in health costs, some readers and experts observed, coincided with a broad push toward deregulation.... “Hospitals and other providers began to behave more like businesses,” Mr. Gaumer said. “And the culture of health care delivery began to change.”...
“We need to see the medical sector as part of the broader gestalt of American society at the time,” said John McDonough, professor of Public Health Practice at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. President Carter was “obsessed with broad public and private health care cost control, and Reagan abandoned that, with the exception of Medicare,” he said.... “‘Greed is good’ was more than a catchy movie line—it was the Me Decade’s dominant theory,” Professor McDonough said. “No other advanced democracy embraced deregulated health care markets in the way that the U.S. did. It swept through health care as it did every other part of the U.S. economy.” Further explanations for why the nation fell behind in health care outcomes, starting in the 1980s, are harder to come by. Mr. McDonough pointed to the Federal Trade Commission’s 1978 decision to allow direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. And the first signs of the obesity epidemic began to appear in this decade, but not enough to explain that decade’s remarkable cost explosion...
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