Health care check-up: Whose system is least efficient?

See also: 13 countries with better retirement systems than the U.S.

Jason McGorman, a health care analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, said there are several reasons why the United States is viewed as being inefficient relative to the rest of the world. One reason is lifestyle, especially given the high U.S. obesity rate. “Most other countries eat much healthier and are much more active than the U.S. population. In Europe people walk many more places and portions of food are much smaller,” McGorman said in an email to Bloomberg Brief.

Contributing to U.S. inefficiency is duplicative care and doctors being extra cautious, he said. “Also keep in mind that the U.S. pays per-procedure rather than episode of care and that companies make most of their money on drugs/devices, etc. in the United States. Prices are much higher in the U.S. than in other countries, no doubt aided by lawsuits and malpractice insurance,” he said.

When looking at the data a different way — each country’s total health expenditure as a percentage of its GDP — America is no longer almost the worst. When measuring in terms of relative cost, the United States comes in dead last in terms of health care efficiency. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have the lowest relative costs in terms of costs versus GDP, the Bloomberg data show.

Although patients may not like how much they’re paying a year in health care costs, the data does suggest at least one benefit: The more a country’s residents pay a year for their medical needs, the higher their life expectancy is, in most cases.

Of course, this correlation is probably due to the fact that higher-income countries simply tend to spend more on health care, resulting in longer lives for its residents, but the apparent link is nonetheless interesting.

High-cost Norway and Switzerland have some of the highest life expectancy rates of the world, perhaps because many of those medical bills are spent on preventive care. In the U.S., unfortunately, the average life expectancy is still mid-range despite the bills piling up from the doctor’s office.