There's something that is often overlooked in discussions of the problems with and how to fix the American healthcare system. Two of the biggest problems are t

There's something that is often overlooked in discussions of the problems with and how to fix the American healthcare system. Two of the biggest problems are that (1) America pays quite a bit more for a given level of care than they do in most other first world countries, and (2) the cost keeps going up significantly more than can be explained just be normal inflation. The discussion then usually focuses on the differences between the American system and the systems of places like Europe and Japan, with people arguing about which of those differences are why we've got problems and whether or not adopting some ideas from those other systems would fix our high cost and rising cost problems. The problem with that is while those other systems do indeed cost a lot less than the US, they also have a rising cost problem. For example here are the ratios the per capita costs when up in the US during the decades starting from the '70s [1]: 3.2, 2.6, 1.7, 1.7, 1.5. Pretty horrible. Here are the numbers for the UK: 3.1, 2.0, 2.4, 1.8, 1.5. Here they are for France: 3.4, 2.2, 2.0, 1.4, 1.4. Also pretty horrible, and about the same level of horribleness as the US. Here's the ratio of 2018 to 2000 per capita health care costs for a few countries: Japan 2.6, UK 2.6, US 2.3, Germany 2.1, Canada 2.0, France 1.8, Italy 1.7. This suggests that perhaps the US problem with rising costs does not stem from the differences between the US system and those of most other places. It also suggests that the problem with higher costs than those other places might not be due to relatively recent changes in the US system that much discussion often focuses on. Instead it might be we pay much more than Europe and Japan now mostly because we paid much more than Europe and Japan 50 years ago. [1] My data came from https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm which used to have a wonderful interface that allowed you to easily generate various views and reports of OECD country health care costs from 1970 to almost the present that let me get the data I wanted in a convenient form. The have since reorganized things and that now redirects to https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html which has a different interface and still has, I think, the same data but I no longer know how to get it as conveniently.