Health Care Cost Comparison

Since health care is going to be a big topic in the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, and since I've had several discussions about health care with friends over the years, it's probably a good idea to round up some data.

Fortunately, we have the CIA World Factbook, which lists all sorts of demographic information, including health care cost as a percentage of GDP, life expectancy, infant mortality rates, etc., for every country in the world.

On this page I've listed relevant data from every country that has a GDP of $1 trillion ($ 10¹²) or more. I've even made it sortable: click on a column, and you can arrange it in ascending or descending order. The highlighted column headers give popup notes on what's in each column.

So, for example, if you click on Annual Health Care Cost per Person until the up arrow shows, you'll find that the United States leads the pack with a whopping $7,938/person in health care costs per year.

If, on the other hand, you click on Life Expectancy, you'll see that this lands us in ninth place, over five years behind Japan.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but it seems to me that our health care is horribly overpriced.

And I'm not going to hype any particular solution. Maybe a form of Romney's Massachusetts health plan, or Obama's modification of it on the national scale, will work. Maybe privatization of the whole system, including Medicare and Medicaid, will work.

I'll just point out that in the U.S. we have a life expectancy of 78.5 years, at a cost of $7,938/year. In the United Kingdom, life expectancy is 80.1 years, and they pay $3,404/year, according to the CIA. And we all know about the setup of the British Health Service.

World Healthcare Costs

Click on a column to sort

For data on nearly every nation in the world, see www.rcjhawk.us/healthcare.

Country	Population	Life Expectancy	Infant Mortality per 1,000 live births	GDP/Capita This is what the CIA defines as purchasing power parity GDP, i.e., actual purchasing power in dollars, not the legal exchange rate.	GDP (M$) This is just population times GDP per capita. Since that's the purchasing power parity GDP, this won't be exactly equal to published results, set, e.g. China.	Health Care Fraction of GDP	Annual Health Care This is just GDP per capita times the Fraction of the GDP consumed by health care. Approximate, to be sure, but probably within 10-20% of actual cost. per Person
Brazil	199,321,413	72.79	20.50	$11,900	$2,371,925	9.00%	$1,071
Canada	34,300,083	81.48	4.85	$41,100	$1,409,733	10.90%	$4,480
China	1,343,239,923	74.84	15.62	$8,500	$11,417,539	4.60%	$391
France	65,630,692	81.46	3.37	$35,600	$2,336,453	3.50%	$1,246
Germany	81,305,856	80.19	3.51	$38,400	$3,122,145	8.10%	$3,110
India	1,205,073,612	67.14	46.07	$3,700	$4,458,772	2.40%	$89
Indonesia	248,645,008	71.62	26.99	$4,700	$1,168,632	5.50%	$258
Iran	78,868,711	70.35	41.11	$13,200	$1,041,067	3.90%	$515
Italy	61,261,254	81.86	3.36	$30,900	$1,892,973	5.10%	$1,576
Japan	127,368,088	83.91	2.21	$35,200	$4,483,357	9.30%	$3,274
Korea, South	48,860,500	79.30	4.08	$32,100	$1,568,422	6.50%	$2,086
Mexico	114,975,406	76.66	16.77	$14,800	$1,701,636	13.80%	$2,042
Russia	142,517,670	66.46	9.88	$17,000	$2,422,800	5.40%	$918
Spain	47,042,984	81.27	3.37	$31,000	$1,458,333	9.70%	$3,007
Turkey	79,749,461	72.77	23.07	$14,700	$1,172,317	6.70%	$985
United Kingdom	63,047,162	80.17	4.56	$36,600	$2,307,526	9.30%	$3,404
United States	313,847,465	78.49	5.98	$49,000	$15,378,526	16.20%	$7,938

This really being a notebook on how to do things with computers, here are the tricks I used:

• All data is from the CIA World Factbook.
• How to make sortable tables using Javascript taken from sorttable: Make all your tables sortable, as outlined in Expression Web.
• Actual Javascript located at sortable.js.
• The trick to finding a convenient place to store the javascript is from Host Javascript File for Free.