Life expectancy increases with health care spending except for guess where. [View all]

[eridani]

As you can see, there is a pretty close relationship between health-care spending and life expectancy. Except for one very, very terrible country. Can you spot it?



Yes, among this group of big countries, the U.S. spends far and away more on health care than any other. And yet it has among the lowest life expectancies of any developed country. People live longer in pretty much every country in Europe, including Greece, where the economy has been wracked by austerity for years.

"What bothers me most is not that we’re all the way on the right, or even that we are lower than we should be," Aaron Carroll, professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine wrote on his blog of the chart. "It’s that we are all alone. We are spending so, so, so much more than everyone else."

This confirms what we pretty much already knew about the terribleness of U.S. health care. The U.S. ranks 46th among 48 developed economies in health-care efficiency, according to a Bloomberg ranking, below China, Iran, Colombia and, you know, pretty much everybody else.