alt Hacker News> The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD. That gap is roughly $3 trillion per year.
The difference in life expectancy will be influenced by multiple factors and may have more to do with diet and lifestyle than with healthcare.
Japan also spends less per capita than the UK, France or Germany. The US spends a lot more than any of those so the US system is bad value for money.
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Japan has an age fraud problem which inflates its life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato
"The discovery of Kato's remains sparked a search for other missing centenarians lost due to poor recordkeeping by officials. A study following the discovery of Kato's remains found that police did not know if 234,354 people over the age of 100 were still alive".
The US also has GDP per capita of $90k and Japan has a GDP per capita of ~ $35k.
Put another way, in both countries a hip replacement surgery is almost exactly 1/8 of someone's per capita GDP.
The US has a high variance population. Aggregating the US into a single mean or median for that matter is a fool's errand.
I suspect you would see the exact same trend comparing Japan and the U.S. in transit, education, and many other services. The U.S. spends more per capita to get less.
Japanese Americans have a slightly higher life expectancy in the US (87 years) vs Japanese living in Japan (85 years).
Japan also has the "Metabo Law" (aka fat tax). Do you think Americans would go for that?
It "may be other than health care" but most (all?) other modern nations on multiple continents in multiple cultures spend less percent GDP on healthcare with longer life expectancy than the US
Try seeing a doctor in Japan as a foreigner. Just a simple consult costs $300 USD or so, and it goes up from there. It's actually a rather expensive system.
> Japan also spends less per capita than the UK, France or Germany
These have to be purchasing power adjusted.
The Japanese system is amazing. Cheap drugs, cheap dentistry, no wait times and reimbursements for all kinds of things (government covered more than 100% of childbirth cost - yes we got more back than we paid). But the best part IMO is the emphasis on preventative medicine. My wife and I get annual checkups which cover a whole range of things including screening for various kinds of cancer.
We in Germany copied a lot of the stupid stuff from America (including the stupid billing system for inpatient stays), so it's not that surprising that our system is also bad value for money.
PS: Outcomes here are not worse than those of rich people in the US, because I know some idiots will claim this to cope
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
But also age-related care is by far the largest share of medical care costs, and Japan has no lack of very old people. Being unhealthy also often reduces the amount of procedures someone is eligible to receive. Despite the blame people throw on unhealthy people for medical costs, they ironically often cost less because of the reduced care and lower lifespan which cuts out a significant amount of age-related healthcare costs. One could argue dieing at 60 instead of 90 is a big loss socially and personally, but overall financially it is a benefit.