USA Healthcare Facts

In 2003, of the roughly 3,900 nonfederal, short-term, acute care general hospitals in the United States, the majority—about 62 percent—were nonprofit. The rest included government hospitals (20 percent) and for-profit hospitals (18 percent). In exchange for tax-exemptions, estimated to total $12.6 billion in 2002, nonprofit hospitals are expected to provide community benefits.

Percent of national health expenditures for prescription drugs: 9.8% (2014)

Many health insurance companies are nonprofits including some of the state Blue Cross organizations. see: Google search for percent non profit health insurance.

It's Surprising How Few Countries Have National, Single Payer, Health Care Systems


It is surprising how little, expensive healthcare contributes to health. See here. (by expensive I mean beyond vaccinations and antibiotics).

Do Americans spend more money on the health care of the poor than the rich?

Ratio of mean health care spending in richest quintile to mean health care spending in poorest quintile, 
For the United States, as reported, that ratio is 0.884 for ages 25-64, and for 65 and up the ratio has two varying estimates, from 0.87 to 0.9.

Trust and Cost Disease

I have been wondering if loss of trust is a significant driver of our rapidly increasing spending for schooling and medical care. Spending is increasing rapidly and yet the teachers and MD's are less happy with their jobs and the patients are not happier with the service. See here.

We don't trust the teachers as much as we used to and so we test more and regiment them more. We don't trust MD's and so we build rules and bureaucracy to regiment them. Part of that is inevitable in a 3rd party payer system but it might be increased by this international competition. All the stories that tell us how poorly the USA does on PISA and life expectancy as compared to the other developed countries when there are many non schooling non health care things that effect PISA scores and life expectancy.

BTW As far as schooling goes, does PISA really test anything important? On PPP GDP per capita USA Ranked 6th, 44% more than Finland, maybe the Finns should change their schools to look more like ours? Maybe the PISA tests are too close to an IQ test tell us much about the quality of our schools.