| This is such a rotten take. America, saviours of the world. It entirely discounts the contributions that other countries globally make. Countries in the European Union, Australasia, etc. The US cost of healthcare is about 17% of GDP. In other first world nations it's about 11%. This isn't service delivery or value, it's underlying cost. Per capita healthcare costs over twice of what it does in the UK. Similar for Australia. Both those are socialised and have very active R&D communities. The average life expectancy in the US is about 78. In other first world nations it's almost unilaterally closer to 84. The US is ranked 69th globally in terms.of health system performance. The US is also ranked worse than the OECD38 average for death by preventable causes. The biggest difference between those places I mention and the above is that the US views healthcare as a capitalist endeavour and tries to claim that competition will lower prices. Quite the opposite has occurred, and the system has become perverted. Intellectual property laws applied in this fashion ensure that you cannot have competition for health care since drugs are limited to a single supplier. You also don't get a choice in hospital care or doctors in most cases when you really look at how medical competition works. In other places, the costs are socialised through taxation. Drugs are purchased through nationalised efforts where suppliers must either come to the table and negotiate prices properly or lose access to entire markets. It's funny how they can still be quite profitable even under this scenario, and yet the prices still be so significantly less by orders of magnitude than US pricing per patient/dose. American exceptionalism ceases to be felt when you go spend time in other first world nations for any meaningful length of time. You realise it's reassurance of self rather than truth on basically all but defence technology spending. |
It doesn’t help that (at least when it comes to healthcare) US is a dozen of different countries in a trench coat.
Life expectancy in richer states like California or New York is very close to that in Germany, the Netherlands, Britain etc. (and if adjusted for the massive disparity in drug related deaths they’d probably be closer to Italy, France or even Switzerland) while the poorest states are about on par with Eastern European countries where it’s barely above 75 years or so. So any average figure is semi meaningless.