That number is shocking. I'd love to know details. Can you provide a source please?
This was the original article I saw when it was $700B: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/how-the-u...
More recent one, I thought it was $950B but this puts it at $760-935B. The potential savings are lower but still in the low hundreds of billions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2752664
I originally started thinking about "how do we understand large numbers" when I saw the article as I think I had roughly the same emotional reaction as I would have done if the number was $70B. Most "big number" comparisons go to things like "dollar bills up to the moon" or "swimming pool full of X" which only gets across "this is a big number". I found comparing it to other enormous projects was hard even as if you take out the US contribution to the LHC you don't move the needle, so you need to then cover all countries costs, then the full project budget for all years and you're still left with almost the entire figure left.
It's common knowledge that the US spends much more per capita on Healthcare, however the commonly offered explanation for this is that the private healthcare system in the US is less efficient than the public systems in Europe. But the graph in the provided link shows that US costs are split evenly between private spending and public spending.
This is confusing because the private system in the US covers twice as many people as the public system. Per the US Census Bureau: "in 2018, private health insurance coverage continued to be more prevalent than public coverage, covering 67.3 percent of the population and 34.4 percent of the population, respectively."[0] If the provided data are correct, this would indicate that US private spending is nearly twice as efficient as public spending.
What am I missing?
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...