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US healthcare is so fantastically broken
The US spends 0.5% more of GDP than the UK on government healthcare programs and covers only 22% of the population. That is obscene.
3 min readApr 6, 2020
Let’s get this out of the way: I have no doubt that if you have a lot of money in the US, you can get the best healthcare in the world. The problem is, the wealth distribution curve in the US looks particularly lopsided.
So, in other words, it’s not all that meaningful to have the best healthcare in the world — if you also have some of the worst.
I would argue that you judge a healthcare system not by its peak performance, but by the average health outcomes across the population…
Compare the health and life expectancy numbers from the CIA World Factbook and a pattern emerges…
Which wouldn’t be so big of a deal, if the spending was similar — but it isn’t. Not by a long shot.
Let’s take a closer look:
