Healthcare Informatics Technology

We have all seen the chart that shows the US is spending more for health care as a percentage of GDP than any other industrialized nation. The latest chart I have seen is in T. R. Reids book "The Healing of America" which shows the US led the pack (at 15.3%) in spending over countries where everyone is covered and yet we still have millions uninsured. It is a statistic to tug at your heartstrings, and it does. On a whim I looked around to see just how we calculate GDP and here is the equation I found Y=C+I+G+NX where Y is the total Gross Domestic Product, C is the amount of consumer spending, I is the amount of investment money spent, G is total government purchases, and NX is the dollar amount of net exports.

Wait a minute - I thought we were considered a "debtor" nation because we have been running negative numbers in net exports for years, meaning when you subtract imports from exports, we run in numbers below zero - we buy more than we sale. So if I am looking at a number as a percentage and I decrease the bottom number, that is going to make the percentage bigger.

So I went to the CIA World Factbook and did a little digging. It was interesting that we led the world in healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP when our net exports were running -$639 billion. The next closest nation, Switzerland, was running at +$40.1 billion and France was running at +$72 billion. No wonder their "percentage of GDP" looks better. Just goes to show you need to know what is going on behind the numbers before you believe what some people will try to tell you.

I am working on a long piece entitled "Does Healthcare Have to be Nationalized to be Reformed?" and it will be a couple of weeks before I am done with the research. If you would like to help me with the research, fill out my survey here
Thanks.