[amiga386]

You need to look at PPP-adjusted per-capita stats, and also accept that there are limitations in a simple measure of "health outcomes" (e.g. average life expectancy)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...

What you can see though, is a cluster that vaguely fits "spend more, better life expectancy", with two outliers:

1. The USA, massively outspending every other country, but having same life expectancy as China spending a tenth of what it does

2. South Africa, spending roughly as much as Mexico or Columbia, but 10 years less life expectancy. I suspect it needs more targeted spending with its HIV crisis, rather than measuring average spend vs average life expectancy

[myrmidon]

Another thing to consider about South Africa is that wealth inequality is insanely high; it seems very plausible to me that most money is spent on like the rich 30% of population, and the majority of the country is basically on Namibian levels of care.

Public healthcare expenditure is also likely to be wasteful; governmental corruption and languishing infrastructure is a comparatively big problem there (compare power infrastructure, rail network, postal service), so the pure dollar value spent on healthcare is systematically off.

Thanks for the link btw-- I would not have expected such a clear trend in this, especially given how noisy metrics like life expectancy are; very interesting.

[randerson]

South Africa's poor life expectancy is more a function of poverty, violence, and HIV, than anything to do with their healthcare system.

[eru]

Interestingly, if you plot disposable income against healthcare spending, the US falls squarely on the trend line.

See https://www.econlib.org/is-the-us-an-outlier-on-health-care-... for a discussion.