American Health Care Number One!!! In Cost

Once again U.S. health care leads the world in cost:  From the International Herald Tribune and the OECD:

It confirmed that the U.S. spends more per capita on publicly funded health care than almost every other country in the developed world. And that includes countries that provide free health care to all their citizens.

Figures published on Thursday by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a 34-nation grouping of advanced economies, showed that less than half of health spending in the U.S. was publicly financed compared with an O.E.C.D. average of 72.2 percent.

“However, the overall level of health spending in the United States is so high that public (i.e. government) spending on health per capita is still greater than in all other O.E.C.D. countries, except Norway and the Netherlands,” according to the Paris-based organization’s Health Data 2012 report.

Combined public and private spending on health care in the U.S. came to $8,233 per person in 2010, more than twice as much as relatively rich European countries such as France, Sweden and Britain that provide universal health care.

There’s more in the article.  We have fewer doctors but they cost us more.  We spend more but have slightly lower than average life spans.  And our Canadian friends spend much less on health care but have better rankings when one looks at the “common measures of health.”

In Europe and elsewhere, access to care is considered part of being a citizen.  Here we have around 50 million uninsured.

Medicynic:  The current non-system obviously needs reform.  Yes, the current plan is imperfect but it is a start.  Without it, the system will fail even more dramatically than at present.