Health care costs
When it comes to spending on health care, experience is not reassuring. For most of the past six decades, with the exception of two years in the mid-1990s, health care spending has consistently outpaced America's gross domestic product by an average of 2.0-2.3 percentage points a year. As a result, health care spending went from roughly 4.5% of GDP in 1950 to nearly 18% today. In 2009, the year America's financial system came close to collapse and the U.S. economy fell into recession, the nation spent nearly $100 billion more on health care than it had the year before. This the largest one-year jump in national health expenditures relative to GDP since the U.S. government began keeping records.
Britain's NHS
