
New peak for US health care spending: $10,345 per person - ZoeZoeBee
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-peak-for-us-health-care-spending-10345-per-person/2016/07/13/3e6a729a-4937-11e6-8dac-0c6e4accc5b1_story.html#comments
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tcj_phx
The government has probably spent $150,000 to $200,000 hurting my girlfriend
since last September. She's less functional now, on psychiatric drugs, than
she was over the 2015 labor day weekend (when she decided to quit using the
street pharmacy cold-turkey).

I've recently come to appreciate that the psychiatrists' drugs - "anti-
psychotics" and anxiety medications - actually create the conditions they
treat. "Iatrogenic Psychosis" \- I wonder what the ICD-10 code for that is.
(technically the term is 'supersensitivity psychosis':
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3736929/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3736929/)
)

She was doing pretty well, until she got the SSRI antidepressant she thought
she needed. This caused rapid heartbeat, which led to anxiety. She took her
last anxiety pill, "fell apart", and the system got hold of her again.

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fragsworth
Can someone clarify this, because the article does an incredibly shitty job of
doing this? Is it talking about an _average government spending_ of $10,345
_over the life_ of each person in the U.S.?

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soccerdave
"National health expenditures will hit $3.35 trillion this year, which works
out to $10,345 for every man, woman and child."

This is over $10,000 per person on health care costs in one year.

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muzz
Yes but as the article points out the distribution is highly skewed: "About 5
percent of the population — those most frail or ill — accounts for nearly half
the spending in a given year, according to a separate government study.
Meanwhile, half the population has little or no health care costs, accounting
for 3 percent of spending."

