26 February 2011

Health care spending adjusted for GDP

It should be intuitively apparent that in "richer" countries, health care will tend to be more expensive, but this graph from The Incidental Economist shows the huge degree to which the United States is an outlier:
The 30 non-US OECD countries line up in a pretty good line, with increasing spending per person as their GDP gets higher. In fact, as I show in the chart, you can make a pretty good line that fits the relationship between GDP and health care spending...

It’s not that we shouldn’t spend more than other countries. We should. We are richer than almost anyone, and we should spend more on health care. The problem is that we’re spending so much more than everyone else, even after taking into account our GDP. We’re literally off the chart. And we’re not getting better outcomes for that money.
Via The Daily Dish.

3 comments:

  1. That's easy to figure. Very few other nations see health care or health insurance as a profit-making venture.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's because in practically every other country in the world the government offers public healthcare to it's citizens, and that keeps healthcare companies from raising the markup of their services in levels such as those in the U.S.

    ReplyDelete
  3. kpresidente, I deleted your comment because you were insulting another commenter. This isn't YouTube.

    ReplyDelete

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