Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

If you ever want to "sanewash" healthcare spending in the US, this random guy stood up an entire website to argue that per-capita healthcare spending in the US is more or less in line with expectations based on per-capita income:

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...

TL;DR: As people/countries get richer, a larger share of their money goes towards consumption. It's not just that Americans pay more for the same procedures (sometimes they do, sometimes it's just sticker prices) but we consume more healthcare the more money we make. So it skews costs up disproportionally. That wealth also enables chronic health and lifestyle problems that are expensive in their own right.

I'm not sure I'd buy the theory entirely, but it's very well argued and as a null hypothesis it makes a lot of sense.

My personal experience is that people in the US feel much more entitled to consume medical services than people in the country I came from (UK). They are richer, but there's a cultural difference too.

What are some examples?

But USA isn't the richest country on earth yet why do they spend the most?

Edit: I recognize that post now, he uses a special metric "actual individual consumption", which adds healthcare consumed by people as income. So the more expensive healthcare is, the more "actual individual consumption" you will have in the country. That is not the normal GDP metric, but using that special metric USA is on top since healthcare consumed there is so expensive.

I especially love the quadratic fit, chosen with no justification, that brings the US within the uncertainty envelope in the second plot. Also notice how much work the Mexico and USA data points are doing to the previous linear model fit. Oh, my high leverage data point can't be an outlier because it's within uncertainty when I fit the data with the potential outlier included. This is basic linear model validation stuff.

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