The pressure on the US health care system has never been worse than now. Due to the COVID-19 virus, there is an urgent need for testing and treatment for the virus. Due to the virus causing a pandemic, it does not matter whether you have a medical aid or not, all infected citizens receive hospital care if they need it.
Regular medical care is not possible to operate as it used to be due to the increase in hospital visits that arose from the Covid-19 infections. Long before the pandemic, the US health care system has been at the forefront of the medical industry, providing its citizens with quality health care assistance in hospitals.
Although recent surveys state that life expectancy in the US is estimated at 78.8 years and other high-income countries are estimated at between 80.7 to 83.9 years, the US still has a high-level health care system.
One of the main reasons as to why health care costs have gone up is due to the rise in drug costs. In the US, citizens pay up to four times as much as other industrialized countries for pharmaceutical drugs.
The US government does not regulate drug prices in the same way that other countries such as Europe do. This causes the government to pay up to $1,443 per citizen. In some of the other prosperous countries, the government pays around $749.
In the US, doctors and nurses are paid more than in most countries. The average US doctor earns $218,173 a year. With specialists making up to $316,000 per year, we can see how much goes towards doctors and specialists. Nurses are paid around $74,250 compared to $58.041 in Switzerland.
With higher payments towards medicine, we can see that it contributes a lot to the high costs in health care. Whereas the higher salaries for doctors and nurses also add to the higher cost of health care.