As I will have to present cases for and against the company providing additional health care cover to employees on a country by country basis I was reading the OECD 2013 Heath publication and was struck by the seeming disconnect between the amount of money (either as a % of GDP or $PPP) spent per head of population and the results in terms of life expectancy across Europe and North America.
As you can imagine the USA spends (by whichever measure) vastly more than any other country on healthcare but on most measures its outcomes are below the OECD average.
As the OECD information is complicated and full of caveats (the proportion of the population above any set age is skewed in counties with low birthrates e.g. Japan) I looked around for a simpler dataset.
Thankfully the public access CIA world fact book has produced some.
The USA spends 17.9% of its GDP on healthcare and life expectancy is 78.62 (76.19m – 81.17w)
For comparison the UK (with its much maligned National Heath Service) spends 9.3% of GDP and life expectancy is 80.29 (78.16m – 82.54w)
The questions I have are:
Is the UK a special case or do other "Developed Countries" outperform the USA to a similar extent?
What explanations are there for this seeming disparity of outcome?
What can be done to improve the outcomes in the USA to get them closer to (if not above) OECD averages?
http://ift.tt/1nH6ltc
http://ift.tt/1bFssAn
As you can imagine the USA spends (by whichever measure) vastly more than any other country on healthcare but on most measures its outcomes are below the OECD average.
As the OECD information is complicated and full of caveats (the proportion of the population above any set age is skewed in counties with low birthrates e.g. Japan) I looked around for a simpler dataset.
Thankfully the public access CIA world fact book has produced some.
The USA spends 17.9% of its GDP on healthcare and life expectancy is 78.62 (76.19m – 81.17w)
For comparison the UK (with its much maligned National Heath Service) spends 9.3% of GDP and life expectancy is 80.29 (78.16m – 82.54w)
The questions I have are:
Is the UK a special case or do other "Developed Countries" outperform the USA to a similar extent?
What explanations are there for this seeming disparity of outcome?
What can be done to improve the outcomes in the USA to get them closer to (if not above) OECD averages?
http://ift.tt/1nH6ltc
http://ift.tt/1bFssAn
Put the internet to work for you.
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