Health Care Spending in the United States and OECD Countries
Kaiser Family Foundation
January 2007
After a brief respite in the mid-1990s, significant annual increases in health care spending over the past few years have refocused U.S. policymakers on the impacts that rising health care costs have on businesses and individuals and on federal and state budgets. Compared to other developed nations, the U.S. spends more on health care per capita and devotes a greater share of its GDP to health. Since 1980, the U.S. also has had among the highest average annual growth rates in per capita spending on health care. Despite this relatively high level of spending, the U.S. does not appear to provide substantially greater health resources to its citizens, or achieve substantially better health benchmarks, compared to other developed countries. This growing gap between health spending in the U.S. and that of other developed countries may encourage policymakers to look more closely at what people in the U.S. are getting for their far higher and faster growing spending on health care.
http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
For policy analysts, the most important exhibit in this report demonstrates that the United States has not only had the highest percentage of GDP devoted to health care, but we also continue to have the highest percentage point increase in total health expenditures as a share of GDP. Although there has been some slowing of the rate of increase since 1990, ours is still the highest. The highest percentage point increase in the highest spending system has brought us neither better health benchmarks, nor, astonishingly, greater health resources for our citizens.
Our fragmented system of private plans and public programs is not working. It needs to be changed. So what are the current proposals? More of the same… but worse! Instead of fixing our system, our policymakers are supporting laws requiring individuals and/or businesses to pay the outrageous tab through mandates to purchase ever-less-effective private insurance plans.
Talk about irresponsible! Now that insurance rates and health care are truly unaffordable for average-income Americans, they are no longer simply telling us to live with it, they are ordering us to foot the bill that we can no longer pay (as long as we depend on the private insurance industry to finance health care for the majority of us).
Every policymaker knows that we can slow the rate of increase while dramatically improving the allocation of our current health care resources simply by jettisoning our highly dysfunctional system of health care financing and adopting a single-payer national health insurance program.
It’s the private plans, stupid!