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Re:Why Some Doctors Purposely Misdiagnose Patients by tzs on Thursday January 23, 2020 @09:03AM (#22127566)
He's actually right about exploding costs outside the US. Just as costs have exploded in the US, they have also exploded in most other first world countries (and also many non-first world countries). Source provided below.

Yes, the US has the highest cost. But the ratio between the US and others has stayed roughly the same over the last 50 years (maybe longer--that's as far back as my data source goes). The US pays twice as much as France now because we paid twice as much as France in 1990, and both systems have had costs explode by about the same factor since then.

Here's a table of costs per capita in US dollars for the UK, France, and the US:

  Year   UK   FR    US
  1980  385  659  1036
  1990  782 1458  2700
  2000 1561 2686  4557
  2010 2871 4048  7939
  2018 4070 4965 10586
Here it is, with each country's cost divided by that country's 1980 cost:

  Year   UK  FR   US
  1990  2.0 2.2  2.6
  2000  4.1 4.1  4.4
  2010  7.5 6.1  7.7
  2018 10.6 7.5 10.2
If you do the same thing with most other EU countries, or OECD countries, or other first world countries, the results are similar. Everyone's costs are going up at rates that are in about the same ballpark.

Source:

1. Go to https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

2. Uncheck "latest data available". This enables the year range selector control.

3. Use the year range selector to expand the range to 1970-2018.

4. The chart will then show the total costs in US dollars/capita by year of health care in 50 countries. You can use the "Highlighted Countries" drop down to narrow that to select a "background" of OECD, EU, Euro Area, G7, or G20 if you want. You can then add individual countries using the list on the left of that dialog.

5. You can change what is shown from total to government/compulsory, voluntary, or out-of-pocket and you can change the measure from per capita to % of GDP.

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