Out of Control Health Costs or a Broken Society

Flawed Accounting for the US Health Spending Problem By Jeff Goldsmith Source: OECD, Our World in Data Late last year, I saw this chart which made my heart sink. It compared US life expectancy to its health spending since 1970 vs. other countries. As you can see,  the US began peeling off from the rest of the civilized world in the mid-1980’s. Then US life expectancy began falling around 2015, even as health spending continued to rise. We lost two more full years of life expectancy to COVID. By  the end of 2022, the US had given up 26 years-worth of progress in life expectancy gains. Adding four more years to the chart below will make us look even worse.   Of course, this chart had a political/policy agenda: look what a terrible social investment US health spending has been! Look how much more we are spending than other countries vs. how long we live and you can almost taste the ashes of diminishing returns. This chart posits a model where you input health spending into the large black box that is the US economy and you get health out the other side.  The problem is that is not how things work. Consider another possible interpretation of this chart:  look how much it costs to clean up the wreckage from a society that is killing off its citizens earlier and more aggressively than any other developed society. It is true that we lead the world in health spending.  However, we also lead the world in a lot of other things health-related. Excep...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy COVID Drug Overdoses gun violence Hospitals Jeff Goldsmith Maternal mortality Mental Health Obesity Poverty Regional Economy Society Source Type: blogs