Put another way, in both countries a hip replacement surgery is almost exactly 1/8 of someone's per capita GDP.
The statement, "The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790" is about the average amount that the country as a whole is spending per person on healthcare, not what any given individual is paying. Per-capita GDP (i.e. the average economic output per person) is the most relevant comparison.
To some extent it's circular: the US has a higher number of GDP because it spends more on healthcare. The broken leg version of the broken window fallacy.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?locat...
So the USA is still significantly more expensive as a portion of actual income. “GDP per capita” is a relatively useless figure
"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 median equivalised household disposable income of a US household is over twice that of a household in Japan.
This is one of many reasons why it’s so misleading to compare prices across countries in a vacuum. All of the people doing the work for those education, transportation, and other services and all of their inputs aren’t going to work for Japan-equivalent pay when they’re living in the United States.
The outcome data is what makes the adjustment argument hard to sustain. Japan has the highest life expectancy in the OECD (84 years) and the lowest infant mortality (1.7 per 1,000). If higher spending were buying proportionally better outcomes, the wage argument would carry more weight. The US spends 2.5x more and gets worse population health statistics. PPP narrows the gap, it doesn't close it.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html
So what you're describing is even worse.
Less than 5% of Japanese are obese (BMI >30) compared with 36% of Americans, additionally 1 in 10 Americans are severely obese (BMI>35) whereas the number in Japan is negligible.
https://theworlddata.com/us-obesity-rate-compared-to-other-c...
So that's about 6% of the difference? I'm not immediately saying no, but it sounds like that's not the real problem.
Black population in the US is still concentrated in neighborhoods formed by overt racism and segregation and same neighborhoods tend to be food desert where no healthy or even fresh options exists. Even if we taxed just the bad food, the lack of options and mobility that higher income might provide, basically means it’s something that would be seen as targeted. Not to mention, people will draw the most racist perception no matter how carefully you crafted the tax because race relations are always unfortunately weak and these correlations are being forced/drawn.
Self-control is, ironically, not usually within one’s self control.
Most people don’t contemplate very deeply about the gap between their will and their behavior. I’m extremely focused on self-determination and it’s absolutely astounding (and irritating) to me how little control I have over my actions relative to the control that circumstances have over me.
Your attitude about the matter is common, and seems like plain old common sense. It’s also dead wrong.
Problem solved. Next!
Most people vastly overestimate how much they are actually in charge of their life.
The only reason you would pay that much is if you're visiting a private no-insurance clinic and not using insurance. And private clinics pretty much only exist to prey on people who identify as expats and make zero attempt at learning non-English languages, aside from a few exceptions (certain speciality dentists, plastic surgery, anonymous STD treatment, some cancers).
> The only reason you would pay that much is if you're visiting a private no-insurance clinic and not using insurance
What alternatives does a tourist have? If Japan truly had cheaper procedures, it would see a huge uptick in medical tourism. There's no doubt that Japan has state-of-the-art facilities and treatment options, comparable to the US. It's no surprise that costs are comparable too.
These have to be purchasing power adjusted.
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...
Both historically had private hospital systems, and just so happen to implement pension/employer-based insurance programs very early on. German's just evolved in one direction and the US evolved in the other.
And no, we didn't had a historically significant share of private hospital systems, those came with the introduction of the DRG System, which forced many city/church owned hospitals into privatisation.
Before that, they had a "Fixed Price per Night" System, which also was a bit stupid, before that they got reimbursed their cost.