The military spending chart makes no sense. ok, so apparently UAE spends MORE money on the military than USA, China, and India...? REALLY???

I think it is very telling that the US, with its privatized health care system, spends a higher proportion of its (massive) budget on health than Canada, the UK, France, Sweden, and other countries in which health care is partially or completely insured by the government.

In fact it spends a higher proportion than any other country with a figure on this map! Shouldn't this ring some bells for some people?

When you really look at the numbers (at least, within a Canadian, American and European context - I don't know enough about how health care economies are structured in other regions to comment) it seems the more inclusive a government insurance plan, the lower the proportion of the national budget it eats up. Hmmm.

The map is confusing - it doesn't exactly define what they mean by country spending - is it proportion of gdp or proportion of governmental expenditure? I would think country refers to gdp but in fact I think they mean proportion of governmental expenditure.

FOr the health data I compared it with WHO data accessed through the excellent guardian data blog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/datablog/2009/mar/03/health-policy.

The choice of metric obscures differences between countries with largely private or largely public systems. e.g. on the visual economics site the UK comes up as 16.3% spending on health, compared to 19.3% in the US. However if you look at the proportion of GDP spent it is 8.4% (UK) versus 15.3%(UK).

Maybe I'm a brat, but as soon as I saw "Columbia," I disregarded these. It's Colombia.

Seeing how under the Constitution, the Federal Govt of the United States should have absolutely no business with Medical Care or Education, I would hope that the Military is a higher percentage of the budget (since Defense is actually a Constitutionally Legitimate function of the Federal Govt.

As far as Americans paying more for health care than other nations.. I would hope so.. that's because we dont have a Govt rationing and budgeting what the bottom line cost will be.

But I guess that's about to change. They already sent their trial balloon of postponing mammograms by a decade... just imagine the cost savings!

It's not enough that nearly every state that tries to make a State-run "public option" system goes bankrupt doing it.... the Democrats will now unilaterally cause the whole country to go bankrupt and destroy the unique American idea of Self-Government and Liberty.

Love the site. The US government spends more on health care because all (well nearly all >90%) of modern advances in technology, particularly in health care have come out of American research. This sort of leading edge research is very expensive and if you have money, there is no single better place to get your health care in the whole world. However, if you're poor, you'd be much better off in more socialized economies. If you control for this research (ie- take R&D out of the expenditure per capita) you'll see that the US has significantly lower per capita costs than most other developed nations.

Jospeh Miller - nice idea but you're off the mark when it comes to the reaons why US healthcare is so expensive. It's true the US uses a lot of the best technology and the best drugs, but that does not explain the massive variations in costs. Also I have no idea where you get your figures from! Have you never heard of Glaxo Smith Kline, or Roche, or Phillips! These are huge mutlinational, non-US pharma and health tech companies.

These are the main reasons why US care is so expensive:

- Brand name drugs and adevrtising of branded drugs - other developed countries use generic drugs instead of the branded drugs - exactly same chemical composition but much cheaper

- Americans are generally a pretty unhealthy bunch - high rates of obesity in particular cause lots of expensive to treat chronic conditions like diabetes, and diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

- Lots of unnecessary tests - there is little to stop some doctors doing unnecessary tests to earn more money and fear of lawsuits drives this even further.

- Poor coordination - apart from a few forward thinking insurers, most US care is hardly cooridnated at all, resulting in lots of repetition from a lack of infomration sharing.

- The presence of large public and private insurance systems means that costs are driven up in the private sector

- Massive administration costs due to the complexity of the system

- Lots of duplicated services - no central cooridnation means over capacity in what is a very imperfect market. In a well functioning market this capacity would not exist, but it's hard to create a well-functioning market for healthcare.

- Treating all those underinsured people, often for preventable diseases is a very costly way of doing things - much better to prevent the disease with early intervention.

I agree with most of what you said but you're failing to see the source. Go to WHO.int and run the statistics controlling for research yourself. I've done this and have spoken on the issue numerous times. The U.S spends significant amounts more than any other country in R&D. Again, if you don't believe me, go to WHO. You site brand name drugs and say that other countries use generics but you fail to see the underlying fact that the drug must first be invented! This costs billions and as incentive the US protects the IP for 20 years domestically. So if other countries get to enjoy the benefits of the MRI, low cost medical imaging and diagnostics its because someone else, namely the US, invented it to begin with.

It's true that American's are generally less healthy and of course this increases costs as well as the unnecessary testing. Everything else is also true but I'm just saying that R&D is the trojan horse that doesn't get the attention it should. Again, I urge you to go run the reports yourself, it's all public data and you can see for yourself. As a medical physicists with degrees in nuclear physics AND economics, I assure you the excessive costs per capita is not all for not. Go to any hospital and take a random survey of equipment, drugs, etc. and trace it back to its origin and you'll see a significant percentage comes from the U.S and that comes with a heavy cost burden.

For the record, I'm not making any judgement on whether or not universal health care of private systems are better; I'm not interested in that debate online. I'm only stating that R&D is a significant costs and expense per capita is misleading when you don't regress that variable.

Oops that was me above, sorry.

Hi Joseph, thanks for your reply. If I may I'd like to interrogate your argument a little more. I still don't think R and D is the thing to measure. Surely the spending on technology is much more relevant. The cost of R and D is reflected in the price of the technology, and that is spread proportionately across all customers. So when GE makes some new technology, they sell it to the UK, Germany, France etc as well as the US. So the marginal difference in cost that the US bears is only the difference in its purchasing of new technology. That difference does not explain very much of the variation in healthcare costs between countries.

Also I'm not sure what regression analysis has to do with this. Total health spending is just that - a total, not an independent variable. We just need to agree on cost structure.

I wasn't implying that somehow non US developed countries can somehow free-ride on US R and D investment by buying generic drugs while US has to buy branded drugs. I was making a point about how the US system incentivises patients to request the branded drugs through advertising. Also the US political system is much more vulnerable to political lobbying, particularly on IP, so the US gets stuck with higher costs. In Europe the European Commission controls most of the law around this and (for good or ill) is not subject to the same kind of political pressure as the equivalent US body.

Sorry, I meant dependent variable. And I do agree with you on one thing - I definitely don't want to get into a discussion about comparative healthcare systems! Apologies for treading a fine line in my comments!

I think we may just have a disagreement as to what's included in our definitions. To me, R&D encapsulates only the additional cost accrued by the investing entity. When you see the figures on expenditure per capita, you're looking at pure cost, not revenue so the fact that there is a return on the R&D investment is irrelevant. So, in this sense, technology is exactly what I'm talking about. When a US inventor or patent holder, even if it's the government, receives a check for the sale of some technology, in ANY form, that dollar figure does not go back to reduce the total expenditure. If it were the US would probably have the smallest expenditure on health care in the developed world because the revenue generation from these technologies is massive. But of course, GE's profits do not reduce the figure of national expenditure so you don't see this. So as far as a regression analysis, I only said that to illustrate the principle that "total expenditure" is a dependent variable that can be expanded out into its constituents and R&D is a big one that is often ignored so when "total expenditure" is divided by population to get per capita units, "R&D per capita" is lurking in the background and rarely realized by the public.

In a large way, the US does more than simply incentives patients through advertising. It does significantly more by making it impossible to buy generic drugs domestically until the IP protection wears off. I live in California and it's not uncommon to see people cross the border into Mexico to pick up the generics that aren't controlled by US patent law. However, I still support the patent laws because these drugs can often cost upwards of a billion dollars in research and without the promise of a temporary monopoly to incentivize the industry, progress could be significantly slowed.

But all your statements are correct, I think we are simply defining our terms a little differently and maybe differ on the relative magnitude of our variables...not all together very uncommon haha.