Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

There is, of course, one major difference between the UK and the U.S.: their health care systems. Despite a decade of Thatcherism in the 1980s and another decade of austerity in the 2010s, Britain’s National Health Service more or less survived as a system funded by national taxation that provides free health care to anyone who needs it. This contrasts starkly with the brutally inefficient privatized system in the U.S. The United States spends more on health care than any other country—almost $11,000 per person every year, compared to $4,300 in the UK, for example.[65] And yet health coverage is patchy. Those Americans who can afford to pay benefit from the best health care anywhere in the world. Yet tens of thousands of people die prematurely every year because they are unable to access health care.[66] More than 30 million are uninsured, and even people with insurance face such high costs that a quarter of the population have reported delaying seeking medical treatment and half a million people are declared bankrupt each year because they can’t pay the costs of their health care.[67] Life expectancy is four years lower than in the UK. The system is so inefficient that if the U.S. had a national health service like the UK’s, its health outcomes would improve and it would save almost 2.5 trillion dollars every year. Deaton and Case point out that the dysfunction in the U.S. health care system is, in monetary terms, more of a handicap than the reparations that Germany had t...