I've lost it in all the trees, but can somebody dig out the figures telling us all:
- what position is the US compared with the rest of the world in general health care? Life expectancy etc. The must be WHO reports or something on that.
- what position is the US compared with the rest of the world in cost of health care, on average, per person? I mean a fully costed, comparable cost. Include everything (e.g. include prescription costs, charitable giving to charitable hospitals).
Once we have these figures, then can we ask the question whether there is a problem or not, and what the best remedy is.
These are a bit old (2000), but are the kinds of things I am after. US comes just below Costa Rica.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~wgreene/...P-Study-30.pdf
US is 37th on overall health performance, 72nd on level of health,
http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
My analysis of table 2 puts US 42nd rank on probability of males dying between 15 and 59.
Table 5 on life expectancy puts US at 24th (and UK at 14th - could do better).
Table 8 has expenditure for US as 13.7% of GDP, $4187 per capita (WOW!!!). In comparison UK per capita is $1303, switzerland $3564, sweden $2456, germany $2713. UK lags behind other major european countries, at least in 1999.
I wish I could find more recent figures.
Do you think there is a problem?