[londons_explore]

If you give healthcare to all, but the economic burden is too much for your weak economy to support, then your people might be worse off than they would be living in a strong economy but having to buy their own healthcare.

[raizer88]

The richest country in the world (ie. USA) have the worst healthcare metrics due to private healthcare (poorer country that have universal healthcare like Italy, have far better metrics). So I suppose it's better to be poor but healty, then dead.

[londons_explore]

Metrics that take into account cost can sometimes be misleading, because you have to consider more philosophical points like whether a lower or higher cost is actually better?

Remember that from the countrywide economic perspective, most of the cost of healthcare stays within the country, so the cost of healthcare really is just a wealth redistribution effort. Free healthcare means 'redistribute very little wealth from the sick to the healthy' while expensive healthcare means 'redistribute lots of wealth from the sick to the healthy'. Social support schemes like sick pay or disability allowance are doing the reverse.

Countries already have millions of ways of moving wealth from or to people - and schemes like income tax or sales tax tend to be an even bigger dollar amount of wealth redistributed than healthcare costs.

It isn't obvious that there is an 'ideal' number, and comparing some metric like "years of life per dollar spent on healthcare" might therefore be meaningless.

[hcnews]

Most standard bodies have published reports confirming that universal healthcare is cheaper for the economy rather than privatized healthcare. Yes, there are less profits for private businesses in universal healthcare and some vested interests will keep representing that angle (with or without a veil).