Health Care Graphic Du Jour

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic encountered an interesting chart in National Geographic, which merits sharing:

The chart shows for 21 countries (19 with universal health care; 2 without) per capita health care spending (left axis), life expectancy (right axis), and average number of doctor visits per year (thickness).

Care to guess which line represents the United States?

Andrew observes:

Americans are being ripped off. The current reform will only move this line marginally, but it will begin that vital process – because it will almost certainly improve the health outcomes of the 30 million or so people who will soon have access for the first time to insurance. And its cost-control measures, pushing back ever so slightly against fee-for service medicine at a time of limitless healthcare potential, might help too.

What this this graph does do is show why the current system, while providing excellent care for many, nonetheless does so at crippling expense to everyone. Without the kind of reform Obama has initiated, there’s no way this will get better. We should think of this health insurance reform as the beginning, not the end, of some public policy sanity. And conservatives would do better to help add more cost-controls than run around screaming socialism when the current system has failed so dramatically in any collective or economic sense.

I agree…although I wish that more effort had gone into working on the cost-controls.  Getting everyone, or almost everyone, access to health care is easy.  Paying for it and/or doing something about the inflation in the cost of medical care is the hard part.

(And yes, I’m saying that the debate of the past few months was comparatively easy.)