The following chart comes from the World
Health Organization and compares how much of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
countries spend on health care. It is no
news that the U.S. spends more on health care per capita than any other nation;
17.9% of GDP or $8,362 per person. This includes $4,437 per person spend by the
government. Bill Moyers journal says this is just behind Luxembourg, Monaco and
Norway. The UK Guardian actually posted this interactive map.
For all that spending you would think we'd have a better system. Oh yeah, profit based health care.
A for-profit sector is designed to get more people to spend more money there. This is what the profit motive is designed to do. We should not be surprised that we spend more than everyone else.
ReplyDeleteFor this reason we have a healthcare system which is focused on long-term maintenance items such as drugs and prescriptions, which generate long-term repeating revenue streams, rather than curative or preventative efforts, which are an unquestionably bad business model.
If you have a food industry which produces lots of cheap, processed, unhealthy and poorly-regulated food, then you can realize some profitable synergies by making the population generally sicker with long-term chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, etc. so they can spend even more on healthcare. And in terms of long-term health, you could hardly do worse than the typical western American diet.
Measured from the profit model, our system is the best-performing in the world. From the standpoint of overall health, of course, it's rather abysmal.
Well said as usual.
ReplyDelete