Thread by @cynthiaccox

[THREAD] The U.S. spends more $$$ than any other country on health care, but gets worse health outcomes than similar countries.

We live shorter lives and have more disease burden. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries has grown.

Along with Jeffrey Selberg @PetersonCHealth, my @KaiserFamFound colleagues and I took a deep dive into the health system. We examined the last 25 years of health spending and outcomes in the U.S. vs similar countries. We look at dozens of indicators from a variety of data sources

U.S. health outcomes have improved, generally, over the past generation. In the past 25 years, life expectancy in the U.S. improved 4% and disease burden improved 12% (though both recently worsened a bit). Meanwhile, the share of our economy devoted to health increased by 40%

Does a 4% improvement in life expectancy warrant a 40% increase in GDP consumption over the past 25 years?

Maybe it does. But comparable countries generated greater health gains than the United States, while the rate of growth in healthcare’s share of GDP was similar

#SocialDeterminants could explain some of this disparity between the U.S. and other countries. For example, the U.S. has higher rates of #obesity and #poverty. Are there greater barriers to overcome?

Combined, the U.S. spends a similar share of GDP on health and social services as other wealthy nations do.

But we spend much more on health and less on social services, while yielding worse outcomes. Might we be better off investing more upstream in social services?

It’s not all social determinants; there is also evidence that quality of care in the U.S. is worse than other countries in some areas. For example, the U.S. still under-performs in the share of patients who experienced medical errors: 19% versus 12%.

One key reason we spend so much on healthcare relative to other countries is that we have higher prices for hospital stays, physician payments, and prescription drugs. In many ways, we use less healthcare and we get less in terms of health outcomes.

Here’s the link to the new brief, healthsystemtracker.org/brief/a-genera…

And our dashboard where you can find all the data. healthsystemtracker.org/dashboard/

And our comparison of health prices healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collecti…