High Spending, Poor Results

By Quinn Phillips Last week, Diabetes Flashpoints looked at how health insurance in the United States operates, compared with several other rich countries. The United States is notable both for its widespread reliance on employer-provided insurance, and for its wide variety of insurance types for different groups within the country — in most developed countries, young children and seniors, the rich and the poor, are covered by the same system. So what does our hodgepodge of systems in the United States cost, and what outcomes does it create? The data paint a picture that isn't very pretty. There are two ways to measure how much a country spends on health care: how much the country spends per person, and what percentage of the overall economy is spent on health care. On both of these measures, the United States is by far the world's leader in health-care spending. According to 2010 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States spends $8,233 per person per year on health care, representing 17.6% of the entire US economy. The next-highest-spending country was Norway, which spent the equivalent of $5,388 per person, representing 9.4% of the Norwegian economy. As a share of the economy, the second-highest-spending country was the Netherlands, whose $5,056 per person represented 12% of the Dutch economy. The graph below, using data from 2008, shows just how drastic the spending difference is between the United States and other c...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs