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The U.S. Spends More Public Money on Healthcare Than Sweden or Canada

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The U.S. Spends More Public Money on Healthcare Than Sweden or Canada

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The U.S. Spends More Public Money on Healthcare Than Sweden or Canada

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

The underlying challenges in fixing U.S. healthcare may be multi-faceted and complex, but the overall diagnosis is clear: costs are out of control.

According to a 2015 health report using data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), per capita spending on private healthcare in the U.S. is $4,516 per year.

That’s 5x higher than that of the median OECD country, which pays $806 per year.

Of course, the high cost of private care makes sense, because the U.S. has a system that largely revolves around the private sector. If companies and individuals are covering most of their healthcare expenses, then public expenditures should be extremely low, right?

Here’s the kicker. The U.S. spends more public money on healthcare per capita than Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In fact, each year the U.S. government spends $4,197 per person, while the OECD median spend is $3,677.

In other words, costs seem to be out of whack across the board in the United States, regardless of whether it is private or public care being discussed. Further, the above numbers are from before the recent double-digit hikes in premiums for most states under Obamacare.

No Bang For the Buck

Combine public and private together, and it totals to 17.5% of GDP being spent on healthcare in 2015. This number is as high as it has ever been, and it dwarfs expenditures in other countries around the world.

Here’s another look at the problem, this time with costs charted against life expectancy – something we previously posted last year.

U.S. Healthcare is a Global Outlier, and Not in a Good Way

Courtesy of: Our World in Data

Spending keeps rising, but the effect of that spending seems to have decreasing marginal returns on life expectancy – a metric that is an important indicator for the overall effectiveness of any health system.

It’s clear that Americans aren’t getting bang for their buck when it comes to medical treatment – so how is it to be fixed?

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Markets

Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

We visualize the recent performance of the Magnificent Seven stocks, uncovering a clear divergence between the group’s top and bottom names.

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Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

In this graphic, we visualize the year-to-date (YTD) performance of the “Magnificent Seven”, a leading group of U.S. tech stocks that gained prominence in 2023 as the replacement of FAANG stocks.

All figures are as of March 12, 2024, and are listed in the table below.

RankCompanyYTD Change (%)
1Nvidia90.8
2Meta44.3
3Amazon16.9
4Microsoft12
5Google0.2
6Apple-6.7
7Tesla-28.5

From these numbers, we can see a clear divergence in performance across the group.

Nvidia and Meta Lead

Nvidia is the main hero of this show, setting new all-time highs seemingly every week. The chipmaker is currently the world’s third most valuable company, with a valuation of around $2.2 trillion. This puts it very close to Apple, which is currently valued at $2.7 trillion.

The second best performer of the Magnificent Seven has been Meta, which recently re-entered the trillion dollar club after falling out of favor in 2022. The company saw a massive one-day gain of $197 billion on Feb 2, 2024.

Apple and Tesla in the Red

Tesla has lost over a quarter of its value YTD as EV hype continues to fizzle out. Other pure play EV stocks like Rivian and Lucid are also down significantly in 2024.

Meanwhile, Apple shares have struggled due to weakening demand for its products in China, as well as the company’s lack of progress in the artificial intelligence (AI) space.

Investors may have also been disappointed to hear that Apple’s electric car project, which started a decade ago, has been scrapped.

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