Why Does Health Care Cost So Much in the United States? (278 hits)
November 25, 2011
Different costs for the same procedure in 2009. Staying healthy in the United States is expensive. In fact, in 2009, the average annual cost of health care was $7,960 per person -- two and a half times what it was in Japan for the same year.
That's just one of the numbers we pored over in the new report out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which compared health care costs across all 34 of its members. The report illustrates significant variation between costs in different countries.
But there were also some commonalities. Health spending has grown more quickly than GDP in the last decade in all of the member countries, except in Luxembourg.
And, Health at a Glance 2011 shows that obesity rates have doubled or even tripled in many countries since 1980. In more than half of OECD countries, 50 percent or more of the population is now overweight, if not obese. The obesity rate in the adult population is highest in the United States -- rising from 15 percent in 1980 to 34 percent in 2008 -- and lowest in Japan and South Korea, at 4 percent. The differences in cost of health care aren't anything new.
Frontline produced a documentary on the subject, "Sick Around the World" in 2008, which you can view here. So what are some of the reasons that health care costs more in the United States? Are we healthier because of it? We posed a few of these key questions to Matthias Rumpf from the OECD earlier this week. Answers have been edited for space and clarity. ...
