I still processing some of the things that Jamie Orlikoff (one of the 100 most powerful people in healthcare) spoke about iin last week's CHEF meeting. One of the things he talked about is that we spend approximately $1.9 TRILLION dollars on healthcare in this country. That would be the equivalent of 2x the entire Chinese economy. All by itself, that would be the 4th largest economy in the world (and it's closing in on Germany pretty quickly).

Let's take a look at this car - the good old American Ford Taurus.

What is the single most expensive raw material in this car? It's not metal or computer chips - it's healthcare. In fact, ~$1,800 of healthcare costs goes into each of these cars.

Compare that to a Japanese car, let's say the Toyota Matrix.

For the typical Japanese car, healthcare costs are ~$200.

$200 vs. $1,800. On average, American car manufacturers have to spent $1,600 more per car on healthcare than their Japanese counterparts. How in the world do we even have a fighting chance to compete?

Playing through all the ramifications of this, we start to see why the Fortune 500 are sounding the sirens - healthcare could single-handedly take out our entire American economy.