Originally Posted by rufnek
In all fairness and honesty, there's much more involved in mortality rates than government spending among nations...
Certainly true. The obesity & violent mortality rates in the US are famously 'above average' and must play their role. The former you'd think could be partially addressed via preventative/informative healthcare (although there's less money in that
), but the latter is really a patch-up job after the event and not their remit. Ditto the automotive, & to an extent the infrastructure angles, which seem reasonable assessments.
At the end of the day the
disparity between the US's mortality rates & the rest of the developed world isn't
huge, especially when taking into account none-healthcare factors that you mention, and aspects like the uninsured 16% or so of the populace. It's just a bit surprising.
What's more striking though is just how much more is being spent on healthcare per capita, for very little apparent gain (see my previous
giant posts for some other possible reasons for this
)
Originally Posted by rufnek
Other factors include the size of population, the size and extent of the healthcare structure, the per capita proportion of healthcare specialists and hospital beds, the proportional size of healthcare budgets, in some countries, the amount of foreign aid donations to local healthcare--the US has been generous in underwriting healthcare programs in many nations.
Not sure precisely how population size affects per capita health cost/effectiveness, beyond the infrastructure issue you've mentioned (and remember there's probably 'economy of scale' benefits as well of being a large 'consumer' - not to mention that you manufacture a large proportion of the world's pharmaceuticals locally etc, i believe).
You seem to have comparative doctor and bed numbers to the UK, for example, according to the above stats. The question remains, given how much money is being spent, of why you lag in any areas. (There are lots of caveats here as everywhere - the quality/specialisation of the doctors can be more important than the quantity of them etc).
PS i imagine international aid will be included in healthcare spending stats.
Originally Posted by rufnek
Plus many countries have a much, much longer experience with socialized medicine, some for more than half a century. (How long has the government been picking up the heathcare tab in the UK? And how much resistance did that system meet in the early days of implementation?)
About 50-60 years in the UK all told, and there have been varying forms of opposition to it since its inception. Aspects like dentistry got levered out to an extent early on (no stereotyping at the back), and there's been plenty of public-private-partnership crossover during the last decades etc. Possibly why it's more efficient, on a surface statistical level, than some of our 'socialist' cousins
. [Not that all the 'outsourcing' etc has been effective. A drop in cleaning standards after privatisation was a more obvious recent example of poor implementation].
Not sure how/why this should effect current comparisons with the US tho. Are you suggesting that the US is moving towards a nationalised system (and that, if that were to entail improvements in service, they would take time to kick in)? I'm a bit confused by the claims of nationalisation in the US. It seems to me that the state insurance angle has been dropped in the first place, and it didn't seem like it was going to be anything comparable to the UK's National Insurance (cordoned-off 'welfare tax') system, with contingent nationalised infrastructure. Is the admin pushing for some form of say over how insurance money is spent within the healthcare system? (One of the theoretical benefits of a nationalised system, if done right).