> Not in countries with a national health system, where the government is incentivized to keep people healthy in order to reduce cost.
Except that in such countries healthcare costs completely explode over time as well.
Except that in such countries healthcare costs completely explode over time as well.
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/cost-of-healthcare-countries...
Can you elaborate? Genuinely interested in the details.
About 50% of all R&D worldwide happens in the US. The US's global share has shrunk a bit, but only because China and India have grown rapidly, not because Europe has ramped up (it hasn't).
Some new drugs are developed in European countries, or by European pharmaceutical companies - that's true. But European pharmaceutical companies all make a disproportionate amount of their revenue off of sales in the US market. So Europeans quite literally benefit the most from the fact that Americans pay more for the same drugs.
Yes, I agree that it's a foolish choice for the US to subsidize foreign countries' healthcare in this manner. Regardless of this decision that we both agree is foolish, it means that it's misleading to compare cost-effectiveness between the US and other countries directly.
Yes, the US has the highest cost. But the ratio between the US and others has stayed roughly the same over the last 50 years (maybe longer--that's as far back as my data source goes). The US pays twice as much as France now because we paid twice as much as France in 1990, and both systems have had costs explode by about the same factor since then.
Here's a table of costs per capita in US dollars for the UK, France, and the US:
Year UK FR US
1980 385 659 1036
1990 782 1458 2700
2000 1561 2686 4557
2010 2871 4048 7939
2018 4070 4965 10586
Year UK FR US
1990 2.0 2.2 2.6
2000 4.1 4.1 4.4
2010 7.5 6.1 7.7
2018 10.6 7.5 10.2
Source:
1. Go to https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
2. Uncheck "latest data available". This enables the year range selector control.
3. Use the year range selector to expand the range to 1970-2018.
4. The chart will then show the total costs in US dollars/capita by year of health care in 50 countries. You can use the "Highlighted Countries" drop down to narrow that to select a "background" of OECD, EU, Euro Area, G7, or G20 if you want. You can then add individual countries using the list on the left of that dialog.
5. You can change what is shown from total to government/compulsory, voluntary, or out-of-pocket and you can change the measure from per capita to % of GDP.