Last I checked, pretty much the entire rest of the OECD was between 40% and 70% of US per-capita spending on healthcare. Some spend less total, per capita, than we do just from public spending that we already do (medicare, medicaid, CHIP, public employee healthcare plans, military care like VA and Tricare, et c.) without even having universal care like ~everyone else does
> Last I checked, pretty much the entire rest of the OECD was between 40% and 70% of US per-capita spending on healthcare.
Per capita numbers can be misleading on healthcare as health is labor intensive, so countries with higher wages will have higher per capita costs with otherwise similar systems.
OTOH, the US spends the second highest share of GDP on healthcare, globally, behind Tuvalu, and about a time and half the GDP share of the second highest large, developed state (Germany). [0]
Yeah, like part of the reason Taiwan, say, is so much cheaper, is that wages are lower across the board.
Canada? Switzerland? Germany? Yes they pay a lot worse for some jobs (software developer, and, more relevantly, doctor) but ordinary fully-loaded employee costs aren't that different from the US. Admittedly, the countries more comparable to the US tend to be more in the 60-70%-of-US-spending range, than on the lower end.
That does mean that even allowing a generous premium over the most-comparable peers, we should be able to cut total healthcare spending 20% while covering everyone and removing a major drag from our economy, and a major factor reducing overall US QoL. As it is, we're struggling (and largely failing) to even keep cost increases to merely the inflation rate.
I was recognizing the potential problem with per capita numbers only for the purpose of specifically pointing out that they aren't misleading in this case because the same thing is there in the per-GDP numbers.
