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the graph gives an important ratio that's hard to capture in scatter plot

age/cost (the slope)

also, how do you identify your datapoints in scatter-plot neatly?

to me this graph gives surprisingly rich information packed

I don't understand your first point; the relationship between two variables is more clear to me from a scatter plot. And that's something else that bothers me about the graph: when I look at a graph with lines, I expect to see trends. But the lines in this graph are actually single data points.

We're on the web, so it would be neat to be able to use the mouse to hover over data points to see labels.

Scatterplots are usually necessary to check correlations. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence

for a famous set of example scatterplots first designed by a statistician warning students of commonplace errors in interpreting correlation coefficients.

in the scatter plot this information is more clear to me, also - in the scater plot if I draw minimal squares line, I can immediately see the countries that are "better thhan average" and "worse than average" with their efficiency of healthcare.

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