[napoleoncomplex]

For those who will click directly into the comments:

The US GOVERNMENT (not the US as a whole) spent more on health care ($1.8 trillion) to provide non-universal healthcare than 6 European countries with a combined population similar to the US did ($1.2 trillion) to provide universal healthcare.

The article's premise being, it costs the government significantly more per person, and 50% more in total to run a non-universal healthcare system serving a subset of the population, than it does a universal healthcare system which covers everyone.

As a whole, the US spent $4.5 trillion (private+public).

[pseudolus]

I believe the numbers you're quoting are "trillion" and not "billion".

[neuronic]

This is correct, US total healthcare spending equals 16.6% of GDP with less bang for the buck than many other nations.

"The United States perfoms better than the OECD average on 29% of indicators"

https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/health-at-a-glance-United-...

Most European nations hover around 8-12% of GDP.

[napoleoncomplex]

Thank you, fixed!

[masklinn]

The US already spent significantly more per capita than every other nation (iirc Switzerland was a distant second, 25% lower or so) back in 2007.

It has not gotten better since.

[ceejayoz]

Yep. https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

We spend more via taxes than any other country spends total... and then we tack private spending on top of that. We've picked the least efficient, worst aspects of both types.

[magicalhippo]

The US has a significant higher percentage of obese people[1] than the EU countries they combined. Obesity is known to be a significant risk factor for a large number of health issues[2].

Eyeballing an average of 25% obesity among the EU countries with the US having 36%, means the US has 44% more obese people per capita.

While that doesn't explain all of it, it surely is a significant contributing factor.

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-r...

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html

[addicted]

The U.S. also has a lower life expectancy than these countries.

So it’s probably shaving off a few years of the most medically expensive parts of a person’s life.

[magicalhippo]

Fair point. So I guess it's highly non-trivial to do a direct comparison without going into the details.

[skeeter2020]

Not if those lives are ending due to extreme medical conditions. From a costing perspective there's not a big difference if you spend the last 5 years of your life in critical care at age 72 vs. 85

[bigfudge]

Reducing obesity is part of our public health goals in Europe though, so the fact we have lower obesity in universal health system countries is likely not entirely an accident.

[ivan_gammel]

Obesity is a failure of preventive healthcare - more like a consequence than a cause of inefficiency, lower coverage and higher spending. And prevention doesn’t start at doctor‘s office.

[skeeter2020]

it's also a symptom of extreme poverty. Very few people in the US starve to death but they certainly don't get healthy diets, the capacity to exercise and the education & access needed to control obesity.

[carlmr]

How does this compare to European smoking? In Europe there are a lot more smokers than last time I checked in the US. Smoking causes similar health issues as obesity, mainly cardiovascular events.

If the US could improve their food, or Europe could get rid of smoking, it would be a big jump in health outcomes for either.

[magicalhippo]

I checked for that first, seems roughly equal[1] with some a bit higher, some a bit lower.

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/smoking-r...

[matwood]

I think obesity probably explains a lot of the cost difference which is why people are so excited about drugs like Ozempic. It may make financial sense for the government to cover the cost for everyone since it could end up lowering overall healthcare costs by a significant amount.

[ethanbond]

Surely food companies will just stand idly by as their revenues drop 20-30%

Surely they wouldn’t figure out a way to produce even less nutritious, less satiating, more flavorful (and therefore calorically dense) foods, would they?

[wholinator2]

Well i feel like that's only good up to a point right? We can legislate the extremely unhealthy stuff like we have started already. Public information campaigns are making more and more people vegetarian and vegan or at least some reduced-shit diet, healthy at every size and the fat acceptance movement fell flat on its face and was replaced with the much more healthy imaged body positivity movement. And what are they gonna do, make our chips literally dripping in bacon grease? Honestly might be better for us than the insane amounts of sugar they put in things these days. I hesitate to say this but, how much worse can it really get?

[Jensson]

Removing food stamps and just giving people money instead is a good start. Poor people without food stamps are healthier than poor people with food stamps, so I don't see any reason to keep that system, it seems to just encourage poor people to buy too much junk food.

[ethanbond]

With hundreds of billions of dollars per year on the line? I’m certainly open to arguments as to how it can’t get worse, but that’s a pretty obscene incentive to make it worse.

[matwood]

No, but at some point there will be a reckoning just like with cigarettes and alcohol. Garbage food won't go away, but the individual and societal costs will eventually be recognized.

[ethanbond]

If we had pills you could take that would mitigate most of the downsides of cigarettes and alcohol, then no we wouldn’t. Then the question would be whether cigarette and alcohol manufacturers could innovate their way around those mitigations. I don’t know that’s possible with cigarettes, alcohol, or food, but food especially it seems very possible.

Also cigarettes and alcohol don’t crowd out healthier alternatives on retail shelves the way that unhealthy foods crowd out healthier ones.

[skeeter2020]

Ozempic: a drug that you need to take forever. Not sure how spending even more on new designer drugs will reduce the overall problem

[matwood]

People already take all sorts of drugs forever, and it's only designer today. There are other similar drugs in development, so cost will come down.

Drugs like Ozempic don't just work on obesity, but they look like they may also work on addiction in general. There's also the second order healthcare costs of obesity that people don't think about - knee replacements for example. I think you're underestimating how much money would be saved in healthcare by reducing obesity rates.

[azan_]

Drugs for complications of obesity (including type 2 diabetes) also need to be taken forever.

[throwaw12]

pure capitalism is not an answer to the USA, especially with the system which allows lobbying of any type.

lobby + pure capitalism is creating a system where anyone who has more money can push ideas to make even more money and use an excuse that this is a free market balanced by supply/demand, because pushing many millions to lobby their ideas is not trivial or almost impossible sometimes.