> healthcare per capita than any other OECD nation.
You also need to mention that the US is not like any other OECD nation. It also happens to he the nation with the largest innovation in Healthcare, and not just by a little. By Far.
there's no discernible innovation in healthcare, at least if you go by any actual metric that would indicate that. Life expectancy in Cuba is higher than in the US, infant mortality in the US is higher than in any peer country, drug death rates are higher than in most if not all comparable nations, and so on.
The pharmaceutical industry might produce innovations concerning some rare diseases or whatever, but there's no discernible reason why that is, or should be paid for by the public healthcare sector.
You have to be careful with statistics like that. I did some research on that a few years ago. Different countries define infant mortality differently. Other countries would classify many failed pregnancies as a miscarriage that the US classifies as infant mortality, for example. This is because the US is very aggressive at trying to save premature babies.
Yes, and much of that small, single-digit percentage of charity hospital expenses will be that sort of care. It's a rounding error on their books. Stitches are costly whether you're in the ER or in the ICU after surgery. Forcing poor folks to rely on the ER for treatment is silly, and needlessly expensive, but it's hardly the primary driver of healthcare cost rises.
Heavily is something of a stretch: the NIH is a fairly small part ($40B) of the federal budget ($1,600B discretionary + another $4,000 mandatory spending).
It's about 0.5% of the total budget, which works out to about a dollar a week for the average taxpayer. On top of that R&D spending has a huge multiplier: a lot of that money supports small, high-tech businesses, which in turn hire people...etc
I never claimed it was a huge part of the federal budget, only that NIH and NSF provide a large fraction of basic science research. It’s always tricky tracing that to actual treatments but the drug companies tend to fund development of promising candidates from taxpayer-funded basic research more than doing that basic science themselves, and a lot of their R&D goes to tweaking existing drugs which might make them more effective/convenient but definitely protects the company’s margin against generics.
You also need to mention that the US is not like any other OECD nation. It also happens to he the nation with the largest innovation in Healthcare, and not just by a little. By Far.