A lot of this talk about profit margins and whether it is good or bad for the consumer sounds very similar to the whole banking crisis situation, with corporate officers receiving bonuses of millions of dollars, while average citizens are trying to make ends meet during this economic recession. I think moderate increases in profit percentages could be overlooked as long as they coincided with significant improvements in healthcare delivery and outcomes. But as we have gone over several times during our course so far, the US remains distant from the top spot in those categories, while spending more for healthcare than other countries by far. Since this is the situation with healthcare spending, and profit percentages are certainly a factor that help to increase that spending, profitability seems to be a bad thing for the consumer, at least here in the US. It is almost as if to say, since we don't have the level of health outcomes that other countries do, the healthcare providers in the US do not have the right to charge the amount that they do, let alone increase their profit margins.

The topic of disproportionately high spending towards specialty care in the US was discussed last week, but that can't be the only piece of the puzzle. We should be identifying other areas of unneccessary spending.