Some years ago I was doing some comparative tax research intending to prove a perception (or more correctly, a preconception) that a major cause of the high tax level in the UK was due to the high proportion of Government (taxpayer) funded health services (NHS) compared to the Privately funded (BUPA, PPP etc) health services when compared to health service provision in other countries.
Note: As I have been fortunate to have only rarely needed to use the NHS (or private health care, I have been a member of BUPA & PPP) my preconceptions were largely based on media content and political rhetoric and not on personal experience.
It did not take long after starting my research to discover that many of my preconceptions were off the chart wrong; in fact, they were so off the chart wrong that I had to find out why and where they were so off the chart wrong.
This led me into drilling down into Government, Private and Total health costs and their comparative outcomes around the world.
Measuring health outcomes provides a veritable treasure trove of cherry trees ripe for picking (apologies for the mixed metaphor) – trying to keep it simple and easily verifiable I determined on “life expectancy at birth” for the population as a whole (further broken down to males & females) and for the cost comparison I used “Purchasing Power Parity” in USD.
This is a link to the thread where I provided comparative tables and a summary, the tables very clearly show just how expensive US health care is and just how inefficient it is (37th in life expectancy):
The degree of cognitive dissonance and denial in the US about the reality of US health care outcomes when compared to the rest of the developed world is rather scary, however in light of how off the chart wrong I had been some years ago on my perception of comparative health care costs it is understandable to some degree.
Where it is less understandable is the degree to which so many in the US have been brainwashed, so much so that they have little or no idea about just how expensive their health care system is and, especially when compared to that cost, how the health outcomes are so poor.
In my world, paying twice as much for the dubious privilege of dying younger is just plain dumb; anyone who can somehow justify that has achieved the extreme gymnastic feat of firmly sticking their head up their own butt.
However, it is indicative of how science, maths and facts generally have been trumped by the spin, distortions, lies and blinkered ideology that, rather pathetically, increasingly passes for informed comment and debate in the US (e.g. Fox News).
By the standards of what the rest of the developed world enjoys, what “The Affordable Care Act” provides is still rather pathetic; however, its enactment was that vital first step (of a long journey) into bringing some semblance of sanity into a system that was on an unsustainable upward cost curve with, for the money that it cost, appallingly poor outcomes.
As a final note, as my research is quite old I have from time to time looked at updating it, however preliminary indications each time revealed that there have been no significant changes that would materially affect the results; additionally, as we are only in the early days of the Affordable Care Act it is a little early for reliable actuarial projections as a result of its implementation.
