Pearl_Clutching_Provocateur:
With every healthcare debate, people point out that Americans pay 2.5 times more per capita for healthcare compared to Europe and receive much poorer results. I’m skeptical of this in large part because I perceive everything in Europe being more expensive than the USA.
I know you are asking about the cost of non-medical things, but it’s actually quite easy to demonstrate why European healthcare is cheaper and more effective (for the population as a whole, at least). From a previous thread:
…I said our system is less efficient than almost any UHC system we could install in its place. You are a federal contractor. I am, in essence, a healthcare administrator. Our system is utterly broken.
Since you asked for hard numbers: “In 1999, health administration costs totaled at least $294.3 billion in the United States, or $1,059 per capita.” Today, the NHS budget for England is about $182 billion , rising to a little under $220 billion when the rest of the UK is taken into account. That’s to cover every man, woman and child in the UK, or one fifth of the US population. Throw in BUPA’s total global revenues of ~$9 billion,* and you have a total UK health expenditure budget of $230 billion.
If you want to compare the UK figures to 2015 US administration costs, the disparity is even more bleak. And it’s not like the UK NHS is a byword for efficiency; far from it. It’s a pretty middle-of-the-road system that is fully nationalized. There are far more efficient models for us to emulate.
*BUPA controls 40% of the UK private health insurance market but derives 70% of its revenue overseas, so its total numbers are a reasonable proxy for total UK private healthcare spending.
In other words, a huge portion of the disparity in costs is driven by the administrative costs that don’t exist in a single-payer system. The post (and numbers) are from a couple of years ago, but are still broadly accurate.