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Comment by savant2 | Hacker News Reader

How many percentage of GDP is healthcare in the US? 10, 20%?

Healthcare is almost entirely public in France (pension also mostly are), so I'm not sure that your comparison makes sense.

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Healthcare is about 17% in the US GDP and 30% of the federal budget. The US spends more on public healthcare as a % of GDP than almost all European countries, including France which spends about 12% of GDP on healthcare.

It's hard to get a comparable read since you don't get a clean split in the #s between what would be public spending vs. private spending if the US + a "Medicare for All" type system, but including the % of GDP spent in US on healthcare overall, it would put government expenditures as % of GDP on par with most other countries in the world that do provide universal health care:

* https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/... * https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

France certainly has a higher % of expenditure to GDP than other comparable countries, and you would expect the USA health care to GDP % to decline to be more inline with other countries with universal coverage if a national program was introduced.

However, because France is still offering more public social services and benefits overall vs. a "USA + universal health" that it's hard to make broad claims either way about who is wasting more money or which system is more effective for citizens based purely on % of government expenditure to total GDP.

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