Spending != Quality/effectiveness of care

I’m not sure what the point of this particular goalpost movement is, but the US ranks quite highly on measures of treatment quality as well. Those are of course much vaguer than the relatively easy-to-measure dollar amount.

What is your definition of “ranks quite highly?” The US ranks near or dead last among developed countries on access to care, outcomes, efficiency, equity, etc.

> access to care, outcomes, efficiency, equity

Of these, only "outcomes" could reasonably be described by "quality," the rest are a further goalpost pushing. And the US ranks highly on those, (e.g. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...). The only way to get US outcomes to look bad is to compare things that also include non-health-care inputs, like mortality, which is like comparing a sports medicine clinic to an ER room and concluding the ER room loses more patients.

This is just patently false. How are you extrapolating a high ranking for healthcare quality from the survival rate of a single disease? The US spends exponentially money per capita yet has lower life expectancy, infant mortality, childbirth safety, etc. than countries like China, Estonia, and Poland.

I don’t know where you could possibly be getting your information from but here is some reading for you.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/u-s-pays-more...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

> spends exponentially money per capita

It's funny, this entire chain started because someone claimed the US spent less than all those other countries and I corrected them.

> has lower life expectancy, infant mortality, childbirth safety

You completely misread my post, because I specifically addressed this point. The reason you look at treatments of specific diseases to judge quality of health care rather than something like life expectancy is that life expectancy depends more on things outside the health care system's control than in it. If you get shot or die in a car accident, that wasn't the doctor's fault, a population with much higher rates of obesity will die at a faster clip than one without, even with the exact same care, etc.

Woulnd't life expectancy reflect pretty much all major factors related to health? (outcomes, access, etc) For that, US currently ranks about number ~50 in the world, which is not that bad, but also not so great for a rich country.

Sorry, by relative I meant basically what effects to an investment in healthcare (with regards to systemic change as was my point), not total spending which is obfuscated by recent COVID-19 response spending and Medicare's inability to negotiate prescription and treatment prices historically. For instance, American hospitals being overwhelmed/at capacity and rural areas turning to telehealth due to lack of healthcare services.

And because of all the privatization we favor in the US because of "efficiency," many people efficiently extract profit from that US spending. Whether on prisons or health care.

I sleep easily, knowing it's for profitable efficiency and not merely corruption.