43. The U.S. Healthcare System Is Embarrassingly Inefficient, Adrift

The U.S. Healthcare System Is Embarrassingly Inefficient

Healthcare costs per capita in the U.S. are among the highest in the world; yet our life expectancy is lower than those of most other developed nations. We lag behind Australia, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, and the U.K., and their healthcare is cheaper than ours.

Healthcare in this country is slow, inefficient, expensive, and ripe for disruption. The U.S. healthcare industry accounts for 45% of all medical spending globally. We spend almost 18% of our GDP on it, more than any other country. Yet our outcomes are worse. Sixty-four percent of patients say they’ve avoided or delayed medical care out of concern for the price tag. No wonder—the top one hundred hospitals, on average, charged patients seven times the cost of service.

What’s generating this combination of inflated costs and bad outcomes? Administrative bloat is part of it. We spend more than $800 billion a year on healthcare administration in the U.S., more than the GDP of Saudi Arabia. Almost a third of that, $265 billion, is spent on regulatory and administrative tasks. That’s more than the U.S. spends treating cancer. We cured polio, put astronauts on the moon, and developed three Covid vaccines in record time—we are better than our current healthcare system.