The graph of life-expectancy vs per-capita health-care expenditures doesn't make the US to be much of an outlier - it's the extreme value of an asymptote. It also doesn't account for overall per-capita income differences, which the other graph does. (After all, most health-care is delivered by residents of the nation in which the person spending the money also lives in.)
While the LE v NE graph does convincingly show the US to be an outlier in terms of expenditures, it doesn't suggest whether reducing US expenditures would actually make any difference to life expectancy or not; in fact it suggests (as does the other graph, more strongly) that overall national wealth leads to high life expectancy, and that health-care expenditures are irrelevant after factoring for overall wealth.
What would be interesting would be graphs which show stronger correlations where the US was an outlier.
> it doesn't suggest whether reducing US expenditures would actually make any difference to life expectancy or not;
That's the key, isn't it? Maybe we can reduce costs without any consequent reduction in population-level health. I'd be willing to pay a lot if what we got in return was a lot, but I think the plots show that we're not getting much bang for our healthcare buck. Basically, we're flushing something in the neighborhood of 4% of GDP down the toilet for no particular benefit in health care quality. Seems like an issue to me.
The graph of life-expectancy vs per-capita health-care expenditures doesn't make the US to be much of an outlier - it's the extreme value of an asymptote. It also doesn't account for overall per-capita income differences, which the other graph does. (After all, most health-care is delivered by residents of the nation in which the person spending the money also lives in.)
While the LE v NE graph does convincingly show the US to be an outlier in terms of expenditures, it doesn't suggest whether reducing US expenditures would actually make any difference to life expectancy or not; in fact it suggests (as does the other graph, more strongly) that overall national wealth leads to high life expectancy, and that health-care expenditures are irrelevant after factoring for overall wealth.
What would be interesting would be graphs which show stronger correlations where the US was an outlier.
Posted by Anthony | Link to this comment | 06-17-04 7:04 PM
I'm a bit suspicious of the position of Azerbaijan in graph 2.
Posted by dave heasman | Link to this comment | 06-18-04 5:48 AM
Anthony wrote:
> it doesn't suggest whether reducing US expenditures would actually make any difference to life expectancy or not;
That's the key, isn't it? Maybe we can reduce costs without any consequent reduction in population-level health. I'd be willing to pay a lot if what we got in return was a lot, but I think the plots show that we're not getting much bang for our healthcare buck. Basically, we're flushing something in the neighborhood of 4% of GDP down the toilet for no particular benefit in health care quality. Seems like an issue to me.
Posted by rc | Link to this comment | 06-18-04 11:02 AM