Source: Health Policy Institute of Ohio
The United States spends more on health care than any other developed nation and recent research sheds new light on why that may be, but also provokes more questions for policymakers to explore.
There has been considerable attention and research focused on factors that contribute to poor population health outcomes, however the research on factors driving spending is not as robust or conclusive.
In fact, the lack of attention on spending is one of the motivations for the Health Policy Institute of Ohio to create its Health Value Dashboard. Other health rankings and scorecards did not include any health care spending measures.
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) dives deeper into potential drivers of health care spending, comparing the U.S. to ten other high-income Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations (Great Britain, Japan, France, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland).
The study dispelled some of the common hypotheses for why health care spending in the U.S. is so high, while also highlighting other potential drivers. More