Healthcare Spending and Life Expectancy

I am not a fan of judging the quality of a nation’s healthcare system by examining life expectancy. Many, many factors influence life expectancy that have nothing to do with healthcare. When examining life expectancy in developed countries, for example, all of which have decent healthcare systems, your best bets at predicting differences across countries are to look at things like violence, income inequality and the like. You probably aren’t going to find differences based on aggressiveness hypertension treatment or the skill of local oncologists.
But this picture, from an article in Health Affairs in April, shows just how important healthcare spending can be in poorer developing countries.

At very low levels of spending, life expectancy dramatically plummets. The relationship between spending and life expectancy is pretty darn flat above about $2000 per person per year. Of course, no health care system should be judged upon life expectancy alone. Often quality of life looms just as large as length of life. But nevertheless I thought this was a pretty fascinating picture. Curious to hear your thoughts.
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