Info: I feel angry and vaguely vindicated in my beliefs.
According to the
OECD, an international organization that's been compiling and sharing economic and social statistics for 40 years (older than me!), the USA has the lowest life expectancy of the wealthy nations, a year less than the OECD average and just barely ahead of Poland, Mexico, and the Czech Republic.
However, our health care spending per person (their statistics include personal, business, and government spending) is absolutely the highest, twice the OECD average. We are far and away the biggest spenders, topping Norway and Switzerland by a large margin, but their life expectancy is several years more than ours.
This data suggests that we are really, really not getting a good deal for our money, i.e. we're wasting a whole hell of a lot. That money's going somewhere, it's making somebody rich, but we're not getting the benefit we ought to be getting out of it.
Our record for infant mortality is also incredibly sucky for the vast amounts of cash we pay for it; only Mexico and Turkey had worse infant mortality rates, out of the nations they compile data on. And we all knew pharmaceuticals are vastly overpriced here, even though they're often produced here (it's the airport economics again: nobody's stopping them from inflating the price many hundreds of times what it's worth in other nations, so they do), but I didn't know we spent $848 per person, versus the international average of $461.
I'm vindicated, because I've long believed that the US healthcare system is screwing us over, and this is an internationally respected data clearinghouse that not only agrees with me but does so quite decisively.