ABSTRACT
The United States now spends about $95 billion a year for health care, about 8.4 per cent of the gross national product in 1975, up from 4.5 per cent in 1962. During the past twenty years, while the price index in the United States has risen by about 74 per cent, the cost of medical care has escalated by 330 per cent. Between 1950 and 1971 public expenditure for health insurance increased tenfold, private insurance benefits increased eightfold, and direct out-of-pocket payments about threefold. In overall expenditures other countries such as France and Germany kept abreast of the United States. In all industrial nations - Atlantic, Scandinavian, or East European - the growth rate of the health sector has advanced faster than that of the GNP. Even discounting inflation, federal health outlays increased by more than 40 per cent between 1969 and 1974. The medicalization of the national budget, moreover, is not a privilege of the rich: in Colombia, a poor country that notoriously favours its rich, the proportion, as in England, is more than 10 per cent. 13
By turning from art to science, the body of physicians has lost the traits of a guild of craftsmen applying rules established to guide the masters of a practical art for the benefit of actual sick persons. It has become an orthodox apparatus of bureaucratic administrators who apply scientific principles to whole categories of medical cases. In other words, the clinic has turned into a laboratory.19
