[WaylonKenning]

The USA spends more than double the OECD average(1) in 2014, but is 28th in the world in OECD life expectancy(2) in 2016.

Personal commentary:

As someone from New Zealand, who moved to Canada, I still don't understand why people would want the responsibility of their employer and themselves to choose what health coverage they want in life, especially when employment tenure can be upended so easily.

Yes I know, USA has funky research and new drugs and whatever, but as a whole, it doesn't seem like a particularly efficient system. So if it's not efficient, what's its objective? For me it sounds like prioritising medical providers to extract the maximum amount of revenue from captive customers, in a scheme where all the prices are similar so it's not a monopoly, but none of them are cheap, so it's nearly like a cartel.

Citations: (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

[howard941]

If you don't buy into the price rationing argument (I don't) then there is no objective other than enriching the incumbents, it's simply a legacy system. Incremental changes around the margins excepted nothing's going to change until something drastic upsets the apple cart.