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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Virtually all national health care systems perform better (in every sense) than the American private sector one.

That's definitely untrue. Check out the cancer survival rates. The US exceeds most countries by far.

Now, if you had said "Virtually all national healthcare system provide better care based on cost" I would have agreed with you.

The US system is motivated to overdiagnose cancer.

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"We need to be careful when comparing US and UK cancer care"

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2009/08/17/we-need-t...

according to the last CONCORD study, this seems to be not true.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

numbers in the US are good, but not significantly better than, say, germany.

There are many rankings that put the US healthcare system as a whole behind its economic peer countries whilst spending far more per capita. Example:

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/20...

Excluding 15% of the population from all but emergency care pretty much guarantees this outcome.

This. I used to buy breakfast from a small food place. The 21-ish cashier lady always gave me a nice 'good morning' and a smile.

She wasn't there one morning and I asked where she was. She died - something to do with her kidneys and she didn't have health insurance.

Now the US gets to statistically ignore her death and claim it provides excellent health care to its citizens?

Why would the US ignore her death? Your comment makes no sense.

I agree, a healthcare system, the question is at what cost per patient/treatment. The healthcare system, is a system, not an industry per se. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for public healthcare... but the comment feels like a knee jerk reaction.

The US government currently spends more per capita on healthcare costs than Britain, France, or Canada.

Is that true? Because when you combine that with the amount that US citizens spend on private insurance and other self-funded health care expenses, wow.

Edit: Actually I found some OECD stats[4] on that suggest that _public_ spend in the U.S is actually higher than the _public_ spend in Canada/UK/France (though for the latter two they are almost in margin of error territory) so the parent is correct.

Original post:

No, it's not true. In 2010-2011[1], US had the highest expenditure in the world on health per capita according to WHO and OECD, but those stats are combined public _and_ private expenditure.

World Bank stats show Norway & Switzerland as spending more per capita[2] over the same period, but then says that 'data is in current U.S dollars'. The data for these stats is from WHO, so not sure if currency fluctuation or something else is a factor here?

According to [3], per capita public healthcare budget for 2011 was $3,768 vs. an overall spend of $9,146, so 41% of the total healthcare spend was public money.

In any case, I think all these stats can reliably posit is is that combined public and private spending on healthcare in the U.S per capita is one of the highest, if not the highest.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

2: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP?order=wbapi_...

3: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2011USdn_1...

4: https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Briefing-Note-UNITED-STATE...

re: edit: wow confirmed. That's amazing, and pretty embarrassing.

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