Healthcare Hoodwink

Health Care Spending and Results in Perspective: The US, the OECD and Canada | The Agonist: "...But at least the US isn’t spending a lot of public money on health care, right? Wrong. As of 2001 only Norway, Luxembourg and Sweden spent more public money per capita on health care than the US. Because of how much the US spends on health care its percentage of public money spent on healthcare is much less than the OECD average (44.2% vs. 72.2%).

So then - if the US is spending more per capita and a larger share of it’s GDP then it should be getting more for that spending, right?

Well it’ll probably come as no surprise that there are very few metrics on which the US outperforms the OECD average.

Let’s run through a few. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) male mortality for children under 5 in the US as of 2002 was 9 per thousand and female mortality under 5 was 7 per thousand. Canada’s equivalent numbers were 6 per thousand for males and 5 per thousand for males. The despised English health care system came in at 7 per thousand for males and 6 per thousand for females..."