I'm not so sure average household income would be all that useful when income inequality is high. You would have to slice and dice those numbers a bit more to make them even vaguely representative of reality.

Besides, you have to factor in living costs.

I've looked into living cost a few times when considering working in the Bay Area and I realized that while my income would easily double, my living costs would increase a more than just a factor of two. I would have to accept a lower standard of living than I enjoy now.

I think the only way to really deal with healthcare cost is to look at whether or not we think it is a good idea that there is a huge profit margin. For patient outcomes and for society as a whole.

> On the other hand, even countries that have tried to control their healthcare costs have generally failed to make much impact.

Because healthcare is an ever expanding, ever innovating industry with infinite scope. For countries with universal healthcare this is painfully obvious. What once was a service in the 1950s to perform what now would be considered very rudimentary procedures and proscribe < 1% of contemporary drugs, now do space age procedures as if routine and treatment plans that took decades of international cooperation to develop.

> In all OECD countries, unfortunately, healthcare spending doesn't seem to be especially correlated with increased lifespace.

Diseases of plenty now represent greater harm in most of the developed world than do ailments of scarcity.

Please stop using average. Median is a much better measure.

It’s really not in this context. The median household vis-a-vis income isn’t necessarily the median household vis-a-vis health consumption. More generally, health spending is massively subsidized by society writ large. Society’s willingness and capacity to pay is much better indicated by average income than the income of the median household (never mind issues pertaining to measurement of the income distribution within countries!). Furthermore, the vast majority of health expenditures in most high-income countries are spent on a small fraction of the population in any given year (those that are very sick, badly injured, etc.)

P.S.: It’s my blog.

Median and average are not good representations of a distribution.

Also even media leaves out the poor who can't afford expensive procedures. It's why Obamacare is ultimately doomed to fail too.

Just looking at your first sentence. I assume you meant median, not media since that is what your parent was talking about.

Median actually does a better job of including the poor than does mean. The reason is that median counts the number of affected people, whereas mean counts the amount of spending. Clearly the latter skews more towards the rich, for whom spending may approach infinity.

Average can be the median or the mean. Usually the government reports median when they say average.

I don't think I should be downvoted. This is just a fact. Hell, sometimes it can mean the mode.

https://www.google.com/search?q=average+definition

That's an interesting measure - wouldn't it be biased by the fact that household income in the US is "artificially" inflated compared to other countries, because healthcare costs need to be paid from income?

First, we can assess the degree to which the US is unusual by inspecting the scatter plot. If US household income was somehow unusually inflated by health spending, then it its residual should be much larger than it is (especially in better models that incorporate some of the non-linearity observed in other countries).

Second, just where is this extra income supposed to come from? More likely households bear almost all of the incidence of this spending, meaning each dollar spent on health means approximately one dollar less available to households to use elsewhere. This is certainly what the literature on employer health insurance benefits tends to suggest.

Third, the timing of this is all wrong. It’s clear the arrow of causation goes overwhelmingly from income to health spending because changes in health spending clearly follow changes in income. Over the past few decades it takes an average of about 2-3 years for changes income to be fully reflected in changes in health spending due to the large role played by 3rd party payers, employers, etc (the current year elasticity is about 0.2 whereas the long-term elasticity is north of 1.6).

~RCA

The graph is already adjusted for PPP, so this difference in income should be largely mitigated, shouldn't it? Thus the US still spends about double of other countries.