Interestingly, health outcomes are largely uncorrelated to spending. This means the best doctors don’t spend any more money—for tests, hospital admittance, and so on—than the lesser doctors. This is worth pondering in an era when higher health-care spending is widely thought to produce better health-care outcomes. In the United States, the health-care sector accounts for more than 16 percent of GDP, up from 5 percent in 1960, and is projected to reach 20 percent by 2015.
which of course explains why other nations do better or equal with less.
