Per capita health expenditures, U.S. UU. The United States spends twice as much per person on health as the average of its counterpart countries. 1 Several studies have concluded that high prices are one of the main drivers of this “overspending.” 2 A better understanding of where excess spending on health is going can guide strategies to address high spending and shed light on the populations most likely to be affected.
Peterson Health Technology Institute Understand the U.S. National Debt In the United States, why it matters and what we can do. Understanding the Federal Budget Get information about the budget, how it's created, and how we can fix our budgeting process. The cost and quality of the U.S. health care system The United States is one of the most important problems that Americans face every day.
It is one of voters' main political concerns, a key indicator of economic efficiency and a major driver of the national debt. The recent release of Health Statistics 2024 from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a comprehensive source of comparable statistics on health systems in OECD member countries, provides policymakers and the public with an idea of how the U.S. health system compares to that of others. The amount of resources a country allocates to health care varies, as each country has its own political, economic and social attributes that help determine how much it will spend. In general, richer countries, such as the United States, will spend more on health care than less prosperous countries.
Therefore, it helps to compare health spending in the United States with the expenditure of other comparatively rich countries, those with a gross domestic product (GDP) and a GDP per capita above the median, in relation to all OECD countries. Health care spending depends on utilization (the number of services used) and price (the amount charged per service). An increase in any of those factors can result in increased health care costs. Despite spending nearly twice as much on health care per capita, utilization rates in the United States do not differ significantly from those in other wealthy OECD countries.
Prices, therefore, appear to be the main driver of the cost difference between the United States and other rich countries. In fact, prices in the United States tend to be higher regardless of utilization rates. For example, the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker publication notes that the United States has shorter hospital stays, fewer angioplasty surgeries and more knee prostheses than in other comparable countries, but the prices for each of them are higher in the United States. A health system with high costs and poor outcomes undermines our economy and threatens our long-term fiscal and economic well-being. Fortunately, there are opportunities to transform the health system into one that produces higher-quality care at a lower cost.
For more information on potential reforms, visit our solutions page and the Peterson Center on Healthcare. The role of Medicaid in state budgets is unique, as the program acts both as an expense and as the largest source of federal support in state budgets. Healthcare spending in the United States is a key factor in the country's fiscal imbalance and has increased markedly in recent decades. Read and share ideas about the issues we're facing. This council partners with governments, leading companies, academic institutions and experts from around the world to jointly design and test innovative new approaches to person-centered healthcare.
However, despite higher spending on health care, health outcomes in the United States are no better than those in other developed countries. To address this problem, the World Economic Forum created the Global Coalition for Value in Health Care to accelerate the transformation of value-based health systems. Due to the lack of transparency and underlying inefficiency, it's difficult to know the real cost of healthcare. It continues to spend more on health care costs per capita than any other country in the world, and health care is more expensive for people than in many other places, such as Europe.
If hospitals don't know the actual cost of a procedure, patients may struggle to compare prices, especially considering how much healthcare costs vary from country to country. Per capita healthcare expenditure (including public and private expenditures, as well as compulsory and voluntary expenditures) is higher than anywhere else in the world, with Germany coming in second, far behind. The United States currently ranks first in terms of healthcare spending among developed countries in the world.
