Ezra Klein: Health of Nations

Ezra Klein has put together a very interesting analysis of the health care systems of various nations around the globe in comparison to that of the United States. (Hat tip: Folkbum.) His conclusion is that the French system is the best overall.

Klein also includes a link to a spreadsheet showing the health care expenditure per capita in different years and in different countries. I have made a graphical presentation of these data from 1990 through 2002:

(Click on the image for a larger, more readable version.) Looking over these data, it is glaringly obvious that we Americans pay a whole lot more for health care than anyone else in the world. Furthermore, the cost has nearly doubled since 1990. Finally, it looks from the chart that the US costs are rising faster than anyone else's. As I wrote before, these costs present a serious and growing burden to the economy.

The typical American argument, typically argued by those with excellent health insurance and large bank accounts to cover the remaining expenses, against government-run health care is that the quality of health care would go down and we would lose the ability to choose our own doctor. Looking at the data, Switzerland has the second highest per capita expenditure, and Americans pay 50% more than Swiss do. For all that extra money, are we really getting 50% better care? I don't think so. Klein writes of the misconceptions of government run care,

What really leapt out at me during this series was how normal government provided health care is. Other nations have doctor choice, hospital choice -- in France, they don't even have limits on specialist choice. Americans have somehow fooled themselves -- or been fooled -- into believing that government-run health care is somehow different from what they enjoy now. I genuinely believe they carry some sort of dystopian vision around with them, of gray waiting rooms and faceless bureaucrats and bread lines with stethoscopes, rather than grain, at the front. In order to keep that prophecy whole, they've had to mentally classify medicare as some weird, third sort of category -- government paying for private health care.

I'm not necessarily in favor of a government run program, but I maintain that this is a looming storm on the horizon, a far more pressing crisis than Social Security and one that demands much more difficult and far reaching decisions to resolve. Yet, the administration is doing nothing about it.

Update (5/31/2005): I was incorrect in my impression about the rate of increase for US expenditures. Looking at the 2002 numbers as compared to 2000, the US shows the 8th highest percentage increase (16.1%), not the highest. Ireland is actually the highest, with a 33.4% increase in expenditure over that 2 year span. Still 8th highest is not all that great.