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Americans spend considerably more money on health care services than any other industrialized nation, but the increased expenditure does not buy more care. To get the facts, let's look at a study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2000.

Granted it's an old study, but things haven't changed much since then.

The state of US health care in 2000

Back then, they found that the United States spent 44 percent more on health care than Switzerland, the nation with the next highest per capita health care costs. At the same time, Americans had fewer physician visits, and hospital stays were shorter compared with most other industrialized nations. The study suggested that the difference in spending was caused mostly by higher prices for health care goods and services in the United States.

“As a country, we need to ask whether increased spending means more resources for patients or simply higher incomes for health care providers,” said Gerard Anderson, PhD, lead study author and professor of in the School’s departments of Health Policy and Management and International Health. “Policymakers should assess exactly what Americans are getting for their greater health care spending, ” said Dr. Anderson.

For the study, Dr. Anderson and his colleagues compared health systems data of the 30 industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) from the year 2000, which was the most recent data available. The authors examined the factors contributing to higher health care prices in the United States. They also compared pharmaceutical spending, health system capacity, and use of medical services.

According to the study, U.S. per capita health spending rose to $4,631 in 2000, which was an increase of 6.3 percent over the previous year. The U.S. level was 83 percent higher than Canada and 134 percent higher than the median of $1,983 in the other OECD member nations.

Compared to today...

Today, total health spending accounted for 16.0% of GDP in the United States in 2007, by far the highest share in the OECD, according to OECD Health Data for 2009.

Following the United States were France, Switzerland and Germany, which allocated respectively 11.0%, 10.8% and 10.4% of their GDP to health.

And despite total costs, the high US spending is still not accompanied by comparatively better health:

• Infant mortality rates stood in the US stand at 6.7 deaths per 1 000 live births in 2006, above the OECD average of 4.9.
• Life expectancy in the US increased by 8.2 years between 1960 and 2006, which is less than the increase of almost 15 years in Japan, or 9.4 years in Canada. In 2006, life expectancy in the US stood at 78.1 years, almost one year below the OECD average of 79.0 years.
• Given recent healdines, it's also not surprising that the obesity rate among US adults (34.3% in 2006) is the highest of any in OECD countries.

Source: Based on “It’s the Price, Stupid: Why the United States Is so Different from Other Countries,” written by Gerard F. Anderson, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Peter S. Hussey, and Varduhi Petrosyan.

More Resources to Health Cost Concerns around the Web:

Health Costs in the News

U.S. Health Spending vs. that of Other Nations

also see in Your Money -> Health Insurance