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Europeans can boost the GDP significantly by embracing American style healthcare. For example, having an appendicitis in US increases the GDP by $10K but in mo
by mrtksn 3y ago
Europeans can boost the GDP significantly by embracing American style healthcare.
For example, having an appendicitis in US increases the GDP by $10K but in most of Europe it barely moves the needle, thus Europeans lag in GDP metrics for the same healthcare.
Fresh, healthy produce as standart? Maybe good for people but destroys the GDP statistics. If Europeans embraced the idea that healthy stuff is for the rich and charge for it accordingly, they too can extract much more numbers from the tomatoes and have nicer GDP.
- therealdrag0 3y agoDoesn’t PPP account for this? Comparing nominal vs PPP doesn’t really change the USA rankings.
- mrtksn 3y ago>Comparing nominal vs PPP doesn’t really change the USA rankings It changes substantially, when PPP is used China surpasses the US with a significant margin.
- therealdrag0 3y agoI was comparing per-capita GDP PPP. On the table on Wikipedia, China is 73rd, but USA is 9th.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- scythe 3y agoI'm sure there is more adjustment than in your caricature, but it is interesting to wonder how exactly a medical procedure contributes to GDP when every patient gets a different price and a significant fraction skip the bill (7% of people currently have significant unpaid medical debts).
- mrtksn 3y agoEvery patient getting a different price should not be an issue, nothing is priced the same everywhere and there's plenty of stuff priced per client. So the situation with the US is that, their spendings on healthcare is gigantic percentage of their GDP and Germany is a distant second with the rest of the Europe and the world trailing behind. US also doesn't have much to show for that spending, all the health and longevity metrics are worse than Europe. The defence is usually that Americans are paying for R&D and UK, Europe and the 3rd world are freeloaders. The counterargument is that, US relies heavily on immigrant researches that were trained in those countries those they foot some of the bill for the R&D and non-trivial costs of the healthcare in US is in administrative costs and not drug or machinery that was R&D'ed in US. So we can argue over the issue all they long but the fact remains that there's lots of accounting differences so it's not possible to compare GDP number to GDP number and if you compare other metrics about the output of that GDP, the USA lags quite a bit behind countries with much lower GDP or GDP per capita. US of course has it's own unique strengths, making it the dominant country of the world.