The Case For Death Panels, In One Chart

That per capita health care spending is higher on older people than younger ones will surprise nobody. Nor will it surprise anyone to learn that American health care spending is systematically higher than what you see in other rich countries. But this chart via Austin Frakt and Dan Munro is pretty shocking. Starting in the mid-fifties, American per capita health care spending goes from marginally higher than Germany or Sweden to a lot higher. Then as Americans reach their late sixties, a large share of that spending is shifted onto the public books as Medicare and the spending gap keeps on rising. Read Frakt for a bit of an account of how this arises operationally, but what I think is more important is that it arises on a meta-level because we have such a fragmented health care system. When your health care spending is all in one bucket, then at any given level of spending you face a q...