From Our World in Data
If you click on the play button (the little triangle down by '1970' near the bottom), it will show you the increase in spending as time goes by. When it is done playing, if you mouse over the graph it will highlight the record of individual countries.
Why do we spend so much more than everyone else? Perhaps because we think we like to think we are sick and we like spending money on doctors and lab work and drugs. Perhaps because we are willing to spend the money and the medical establishment is willing to take it. In any case, I suspect it's just our mind set: charge on until we are stopped, and then bust down the barricade and charge on some more. i.e. Crazy people run up bigger medical bills, and we Americans might be the craziest of all.
I dunno, but I suspect most of our health care dollars are spent on old people, and a lot of that is spent on people who are not even mentally with us anymore. It is easy to foist unnecessary treatments on people who are barely aware of what's going on. But hey, medicare will pay for it, so it gets done.
Via Detroit Steve
You're partly right, especially about squandering care costs on those who should be dying at home with hospice care, but you're missing a huge component:
ReplyDeletelegal costs.
Doctors do tests that are not medically necessary because of sue-happy patients.
50% (you read that right) of an OB-GYN doc's annual take goes just to pay malpractice insurance fees, because they get sued for everything, even when momma was smoking crack and shooting heroin right up until delivery day.
When you factor lawyers out of the medical costs, we drop to right around middle of the pack, but until we stop making anything-I-don't-like-that-happens into cause for a medical lawsuit lottery jackpot, the costs will skyrocket as long as juries keep awarding ridiculous amounts for stupid lawsuits.