So Britain as a whole spends roughly half (in terms of percentage of GDP) on healthcare as the US. That includes both public and private expenditure. At similar health outcomes.
Now Singapore spends roughly half of what Britain spends (in terms of percentage of GDP), and our population is no worse off for it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
What you can see though, is a cluster that vaguely fits "spend more, better life expectancy", with two outliers:
1. The USA, massively outspending every other country, but having same life expectancy as China spending a tenth of what it does
2. South Africa, spending roughly as much as Mexico or Columbia, but 10 years less life expectancy. I suspect it needs more targeted spending with its HIV crisis, rather than measuring average spend vs average life expectancy
Public healthcare expenditure is also likely to be wasteful; governmental corruption and languishing infrastructure is a comparatively big problem there (compare power infrastructure, rail network, postal service), so the pure dollar value spent on healthcare is systematically off.
Thanks for the link btw-- I would not have expected such a clear trend in this, especially given how noisy metrics like life expectancy are; very interesting.
See https://www.econlib.org/is-the-us-an-outlier-on-health-care-... for a discussion.
Eg owning a car or cigarettes are very expensive here. But eating out starts much cheaper than in the UK. (There's no upper limit in either place, of course.)
On the other hand, there are EU countries such as lithuania and estonia, that spend less than half per capita of Singapore, and are ranked with a higher healthcare index.
Also perhaps our more enlightened policies are helping us achieve that higher per capita GDP?
No idea why you are equating enlightenment to per-capita GDP. I don’t quite understand that equation. Singapore may have a high per capita GDP, but that isn't resulting in a higher median individual incomes. Given the extremely high cost of living, the purchasing power of an average Singaporean is actually comparable to that of someone in the less affluent EU countries that have 1/4 of the GDP per capita and equivalent (or better!) healthcare. So while the GDP figure looks impressive, it doesn’t fully reflect the financial reality for most residents. Is that your "enlightened policies" at work?
Singapore’s GDP per-capita is likely fairly inflated as it doesn’t correct for the effect of multinational tax planning by large corporations on the GDP statistics , unlike say Ireland.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_gross_national_inco...