February 1st, 2016
Keenan Cromshaw
450 Ehringhaus Drive
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Medical Communications Group
Ms. Sarah Boyd
24950 Country Club Drive, Suite 200
North Olmsted, Ohio 44070
Dear Ms. Boyd,
I am pleased to submit to you a paper about a question many of us ask: How and why is U.S. healthcare so expensive as compared to European healthcare. My name is Keenan Cromshaw and I am a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel hill currently working towards a biology degree with aspirations to go to medical school and become an emergency room physician. I believe that this paper would greatly help to enrich Medical Economics and their viewers as it is both a topic that pertains to your journal and is a very relevant and important topic that is being discussed today. We frequently hear about the high costs of insurance premiums, medicines you buy, the debt after surgery, etc. and reducing these costs would help out Americans everywhere mentally, physically, and financially.
My paper will discuss the many aspects of this complex problem and how we can stop it. The main points highlighted will be first how the U.S. has a much higher rate of obesity and conditions related to obesity (like diabetes) as compared to every other European nation leading to much greater medical costs. Next, I will discuss how United States taxpayers and health insurance premium purchasers pay an extremely large amount of money for the phenomenon known as “defensive medicine”, which is essentially medical practitioners who order unnecessary tests, procedures, and treatments plans due to a variety of reasons. After this, the point will be made that the U.S. spends more per capita on research, development, and purchasing of prescription drugs than their European counterparts due to a variety of reasons such as how more medicine is prescribed per capita than Europeans. Lastly, I will discuss how the U.S. has both a higher rate of ownership and usage of advanced diagnostic technologies such as MRI’s, CT scans, mammography tests, etc., which drives up medical costs. Furthermore, statistics will be shown that indicate the U.S. has a much higher number of expensive surgeries than Europe- often deemed as unnecessary. The remainder of the article will discuss how we can stop these problems in order to help everyone in the United States reduce healthcare costs and increased medical efficacy and efficiency.
Once again I believe this paper will greatly help to augment and bring attention to an important and growing issue. Thank you for your consideration!
Sincerely,
Keenan Cromshaw
(910)-471-1799