When You’re Big, You Can Be Your Own B2B E-Marketplace

Evidence to suggest that the United States is on the “Flat-of-the-curve” in health production appears to be limited. A number of articles referenced a paper titled “Flat of the Curve Medicine – A New Perspective on the Production of Health” written by Johannes Schoder and Peter Zweifel in 2009. In their paper they studied health data from 24 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries from1960 to 2004.

The data showed the health care expenditures during this time frame increased from 3.8% on average to 8.9% of GDP with an increase in average life expectancy at birth from 68.4 to 78.5 years. This data suggests these countries had a good rate of return on their investment indicating they were not on the flat-of-the-curve. However this increase slowed from 0.3 per annum to 0.19 from 1980 to 2004. The authors interpreted this as evidence of decreasing marginal returns. When I say the evidence is limited I am referring to its scope. One the data comes only from 24 developed countries and two it does not account for all the variables associated with how people conduct their lives. Do they smoke, do they drink, how much, do they exercise etc…

Another paper written by David Cutler in the National Bureau of Economic Research, Sept 7 2012, discussed the difference in productivity growth in the health care industry compared to other sectors of the economy. “Success in medicine has almost always been associated with more intensive care or interventions to treat more severe patients”. “In other industries productivity growth has been driven primarily not by the development of new goods but by new ways of organizing production, distribution and sales, changes that resulted in more output per dollar of inputs”.

I believe the United States as a whole is currently on the “Flat-of-the-curve”. However if you ask other individuals you may get a variety of response based on their ability to afford health insurance. To some it would be...