Thread by @ezraklein

The Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice dashboard letting you compare international health systems. A few things jump out.

In the UK, where they have honest-to-Bob socialized medicine, it's as easy to get a same-day or next-day appointment as it is here. healthsystemtracker.org/indicator/acce…

That's probably because though physicians are paid a lot less, the UK has slightly more doctors-per-capita than the US.

Oh, and the UK spends about 40% what we do per-person.

Imagine if we could take $6,000 per-person, per year, and put it to a better use 🤯

None of this would matter if socialized medicine was somehow destroying everyone's health, but if that's the case, it's certainly not showing up in life expectancy.

And yes, I know that life expectancy data is noisy, as a lot more than health care goes into mortality.

So here's Healthcare Quality and Access index ratings, which focus on mortality caused by conditions health systems can actually treat.

This isn't to say the UK has a perfect system, or even that it's the system that I'd choose for the US. It isn't.

But it's the most extreme example of a government-run health system — the government owns the hospitals and pays the doctors — and it works pretty damn well.

We deserve a lot more for the amount we're spending, or we deserve to spend a lot less for the amount we're getting.