11 Charts That Show Exactly What's Wrong With The US Healthcare System
Erin Brodwin
hospital scan
Theo Heimann / Getty Images
The United States spends more on healthcare than any other developed nation. Having a baby here costs more than it would in any other country.
Yet Americans lead far shorter lives than residents of other developed countries. American infants have a lower chance of surviving past infancy than those born in eight other affluent nations.
What explains these striking incongruities? He re are 11 charts that might help.
1. Americans don’t live as long as we should.
In terms of overall life expectancy, the United States ranks 26th out of 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries. Americans enjoy fewer years than Slovenians and Koreans, living just a tad longer than Czechs and Chileans, who used to rank far behind us.
Nearly a fifth of America’s gross domestic product goes toward healthcare spending, putting us above the Netherlands, France, Germany, Canada and Switzerland, where actual health outcomes are much better.
Americans are more likely to die from asthma than people than in Brazil or Costa Rica, even though the disease is equally prevalent in those countries.
We send more adult asthma sufferers to the hospital to be treated than any other developed country, coming in just under the Slovakian Republic. The soaring cost of asthma medication in the US (a Qvar brand inhaler, for example, costs 18 times more in the US than it does in Greece) is partially to blame for this problem, but access to preventative care also plays a role. Uninsured asthma patients are far more likely to die in the hospital than those with insurance.
In 2009, the average black American could expect to live to just 75, the same life expectancy white Americans enjoyed 30 years earlier in 1979. Today, Black Americans remain far more likely than white Americans to die from heart disease, cancer and diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In comparison to physicians in the Czech Republic, New Zealand, France and Israel, doctors in the US spend far less time consulting with patients and do a far worse job explaining to them what’s wrong.
The US spends a huge chunk of its budget on pharmaceutical drugs. Unlike other countries, whose governments regularly haggle with pharmaceutical companies to reduce drug prices, Medicare is forbidden from engaging in such negotiations. This is why a cancer drug like Gleevec, which costs about $1,000 in New Zealand and Canada, costs an average of $6,214 in the US. Even the common pain medication Celebrex, which runs for $51 in Canada, can cost anywhere from two to nine times that amount in the US.
10. American babies are the most expensive in the world.
Giving birth in the US — including hospitalization and a normal delivery — costs an average of $10,002, nearly five times more than the cost of birth in Argentina or Spain.
In 2004, the latest year that data are available for all countries, the US ranked 29th globally in infant mortality, with the same rate of infant death as Slovakia and Poland.
