I discovered a quite well-researched and penetrating analysis of health care spending this morning on R.C. Hoetzlein's Web site. Not that there's really anything groundbreaking or new here, but he does a nice job of providing good reference links and crossing a lot of T's and dotting a lot of I's.
What I drew from his work was the observation that health care spending across the globe pretty much tracks the wealth of nations. The wealthier nations tend to spend more of their GDP on health care, probably reflecting a desire to do so by the populace.
The one exception is Japan, but having once worked in Japan, I must say it's not a place where you'd want to get sick unless you had lots of money and/or lots of connections.
A graph follows, but I can't vouch for its graphic quality:
The Wealth of Nations and Health Care Spending: No Surprises Here is a post from: Labor Law Guy
