Health care spending vs. life expectancy

ID:89206
 
Jan 4 2010, 11:46 am
Keywords: care, health, healthcare
From Andrew Gelman at Columbia University.



(The area of the circle represents the number of doctor visits per person per year)

What the scatterplot really made me realize was the arbitrariness of the scaling of the parallel coordinate plot. In particular, the posted graph gives a sense of convergence, that spending is all over the map but all countries have pretty much the same life expectancy--look at the way the lines converge to a narrow zone as you follow the lines from the left to the right of the plot.

Actually, though, once you remove the U.S., there's a strong correlation between spending and life expectancy, and this is super-clear from the scatterplot.
Jan 4 2010, 12:29 pm
Interesting. Do people in Norway never visit the doctor?
Jan 4 2010, 1:25 pm
Vermolius wrote:
Interesting. Do people in Norway never visit the doctor?

Just what I was wondering. But at the same time they have a longer lifespan than America. I'm personally thinking less and less of Americans, considering we can kill ourselves before most other people despite the large amount of spending in health care.
Jan 4 2010, 1:36 pm
Vermolius wrote:
Interesting. Do people in Norway never visit the doctor?

From comments on Gelman's article:

Author Profile Page William Ockham replied to comment from NA | January 4, 2010 5:22 PM | Reply
Because there is no data in the file for doctor visits per capita (which is what the circle represents) for Norway.
Jan 4 2010, 1:45 pm
I suspect this would also benefit from a listing of populations and population densities.
Jan 4 2010, 3:23 pm
Vermolius wrote:
I suspect this would also benefit from a listing of populations and population densities.

Indeed, that would be a big factor. You really can't come to many conclusions from just this chart here. It's interesting nonetheless.
Jan 4 2010, 5:12 pm
There's plenty that can be drawn from the graph, Fugsnarf. Specifically, something is wrong with US healthcare. Population density would have an effect, I imagine - but notice that Japan, one of the densest populations in the world, is right up there. Overall population probably matters to some extent, but I can't imagine it would make for a four-year life expectancy differential and twice as much per-person healthcare spending.