Abstract
All healthcare systems cost a lot of money, but the parallel and semi-private ones tend to be more expensive than any other. The classic example is the United States, which spends 17% of its GDP on healthcare, even though millions of people do not have legal rights to it. The chapter discusses some of the cost-driving mechanisms in a divided welfare state. Among them, we find a highly complex and fragmented payment system, an unregulated distribution and utilization of expensive new technologies, high administrative costs, high advertising costs, high salaries and remunerations to doctors, high drug costs and drug use, defensive medicine, that is, doctors who order unnecessary and costly samples and treatments because of fear of being sued by the beneficiaries for malpractice.
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Lapidus, J. (2019). A Spiral of Rising Costs. In: The Quest for a Divided Welfare State. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24784-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24784-3_10
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