Some people (1, 2, 3, 4)  have made hay out of data showing total health spending in the United States is heavily concentrated on a small fraction of the population:

source

My intuition and knowledge of the health care industry has long led me believe this likely not too dissimilar from what goes on in other developed countries (the young and/or reasonably healthy simply do not need or want much in the way of health care).   If nothing else it seems unreasonable to use this data to argue the US is an outlier without at least going through the exercise of comparing it to other countries.  Unfortunately the OECD and related entities provide little in the way of public data along these lines, so I have not been able to do this analysis myself.

However, I recently stumbled across a blog post from IFS regarding a study they published that speaks directly to these and related topics, so I thought I would briefly share this and related information in a quick-and-dirty blog post (full-text copy here).

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In my prior few posts I made a strong case that the United States’ exceptionally high health care expenditures are well explained by its unusually high material standard of living.   In response to this several people I have interacted with have fallen back to the position that something still must obviously be uniquely wrong with the US health care system because US outcomes are significantly below what one might expect given its level of spending:

They believe it cannot be a coincidence that the country that spends so much more than expected (according to naive expectations) also gets worse outcomes than expected and generally gets worse outcomes than the most developed countries of predominantly European and Asian origin.

In this blog post I will address the so-called “outcomes” dimension and explain why these apparently sub-par outcomes are not only not otherwise inexplicable, but can actually be explained in a fairly straight forward and parsimonious fashion  For the moment, I will narrow my focus on the subset of factors that drive US health outcomes significantly below naive expectations (not necessarily the full residual) and that I have good reason to suspect are significantly causally related to the expenditures issue.  Later, perhaps in another lengthy blog post, I will address other factors that are mostly orthogonal to expenditures and that further affect US health outcomes.

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In my prior post, wherein I argued at length that US health care expenditures are reasonably well explained by Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) and that GDP is an inferior predictor, I pointed out toward the end that the linear specification I used is likely to significantly overstate US residuals because there is good evidence for non-linearity and because the US is far out on the frontier vis-a-vis consumption.

This non-linearity can be seen pretty clearly if you look at the 2011 data derived from the World Bank (for AIC) and WHO (for HCE).

Since some people may (1) doubt the accuracy of these statistics outside of the few highly developed countries (2) imagine that these poor countries are somehow qualitatively different in a way that’s not well correlated with their level of economic development or (3) are particularly reluctant to accept non-linearity as a potential partial explanation for the US here, I thought I’d approach this from a somewhat different angle.

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About two years ago I created a long blog post arguing that the United States is not an outlier in healthcare expenditures per capita.   Following renewed interest from a link from Marginal Revolution recently and some criticism from a few people on various comment threads, I thought I’d take the time to update the evidence, address some areas of criticism, and muster yet more lines of evidence to support my argument.   This post should largely make the earlier post obsolete, but I will keep the earlier post up for posterity and to retain data/information that won’t necessarily be perfectly duplicated in this post.

There exist several popular plots like these that people use to make the argument that the United States spends vastly more than it should for its level of wealth.

These plots and the arguments that usually go with them give the strong impression that US spends about twice as much as it should.  However, these are misleading for several reasons, namely:

1. GDP is a substantially weaker proxy for “wealth” and a substantially weaker predictor of health care expenditures than other available measures.
2. The US is much wealthier than other countries in these plots in reality.
3. The arbitrary selection of a handful of countries tends to hide the problems with GDP in this context and, oddly enough, simultaneously downplay the strength of the relationship between wealth and health care spending
4. Comparing these two quantities with a linear scale tends to substantially overstate the apparent magnitude of the residuals from trend amongst the richer economies when what we’re implicitly concerned with is the percentage spent on healthcare.

When properly analyzed with better data and closer attention to detail, it becomes quite clear that US healthcare spending is not astronomically high for a country of its wealth.  Below I will layout these arguments in much greater detail and provide data, plots, and some statistical analysis to prove my point.

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