Health Care: What's the Problem?

I promised some wonky posts and here is the first. I find that the graph above is almost completely unknown by the general public. What the graph shows is the expenditure of each country on health care per person in the country. What's really nice is that the graph breaks down public and private spending. Look at just the dark blue, public spending, starting at the U.S. and scanning over you'll quickly see that the U.S. spends more tax dollars than France, Germany, Denmark, England and Japan. That is, in some ways we have "socialized medicine" already we just do it so badly that we don't get anything for it. Of course, the even more obvious note is just the staggering amount the U.S. spends on health care per person compared to other advanced countries. We spend more than twice as much the average OECD country. A caveat is that only Norway and Switzerland are approximately the same as the US in terms of standard of livings, GDP per capita, Norway having slightly better and the Swiss slightly worse. [Luxembourg is habitually ignored, because it is strange in many ways. Its GDP/per cap is approaching twice the U.S.'s].

So these are the numbers, the question becomes "are we getting a good deal?" I'm going to leave that to the readers.