Superb Read: UK v USA – the basic healthcare facts

[percussivemadness]

It’s worth noting in this US vs the NHS row is that the US has just about the highest healthcare spending in the world – 2nd highest by percentage of GDP, first by overall cost – largely because it’s among the most expensive. Time for some numbers – all freely available via Google.

I hold no brief for the NHS (and unlike most LibCon contributors tend to lean towards part-privatisation of its services), I’m just interested in the facts, so feel free to correct me if I’ve got some of the maths or figures wrong.

Of the 15% of GDP the US spends on healthcare annually (that’s about $2.2 trillion*), around 50% is spent by the government (around $1.1 trillion). By contrast, the UK spends around 8% of its GDP on healthcare, with the Department of Health’s budget for the NHS (England**) in 2008/9 around £94 billion (about $155 billion).

The English NHS cares for 49 million people (100% of the population of England); US public healthcare currently covers about 83 million (around 28% of the US population).

For a direct comparison, that means that in England the government spends around $3,200 per capita on healthcare and covers the entire population whereas in the US the federal government spends around $3,700 per capita and yet covers less than a third of the population.

Take away those 80 million covered by the US’s state healthcare (which doesn’t cover all uninsured Americans, so this is being generous) from the States’ 300 million population, we’re left with 220 million Americans to account for the other $1.1 trillion spent in the US each year on private healthcare.

If I’ve got my maths right, that works out as $5000 for every American in the private system – almost $2,000 a year more than the NHS costs.***

Yep, that’s right capitalism fans – the US free market system for healthcare provision is significantly less efficient than a “socialised” one.

This no doubt explains the Republican fear of universal US healthcare – if providing government healthcare funding for less than a third of the population costs $1.1 trillion, they no doubt imagine it would involve a bit more than a threefold increase in public healthcare spending to cover the entire population. (If they’re being really cynical, they’d no doubt point out that the US government’s $1.1 trillion healthcare spend divided by 83 million works out as a cost of $13,250 per person per annum – and therefore the annual cost to cover all Americans at that rate could be as high as $4 trillion a year.)

Of course, what they’re failing to do is take into account the ability a public healthcare system would have to drive down costs, and in their attacks on the NHS are choosing to ignore the simple fact that the NHS (even with all its problems and wastage) works out as far, far better value for money than even the current US system.

Were you to be more of a lefty than me, you might be tempted at this point to suggest that it is precisely this ability of a national health service to drive down costs that the Republicans are opposed to, as it’d leave the rich pharmaceutical companies out of pocket.

But this in turn would ignore the fact that the US’s over-spending on medicine thanks to its piss-poor health system helps to subsidise the cheaper medicine available in other parts of the world by offsetting pharmaceutical R&D costs, etc. – in other words, a US version of the NHS would almost certainly decrease the cost of US healthcare, but may well end up raising it elsewhere…

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/08/14/uk-v-usa-the-basic-healthcare-facts/