Member-only story
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.
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:
UK healthcare spending
In the UK, the government spends $164bn per year (6.3% of GDP) on the NHS — which covers every man, woman, and child in the country. The country’s inhabitants spend an additional $78bn on private healthcare. Total healthcare spending is 9.23% of GDP .
Compare that with…
US healthcare spending
In the US, the government spends $1.2tn (6.8% of GDP) on Medicare and Medicaid, which covers around 22% of the population. In addition, people living in the US spend an additional $2.2tn on their healthcare, spending a total of 18% of GDP on keeping themselves healthy.
