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The United States spent twice as much on health care than ten other high-income countries in 2016, largely because of the high costs of prescription drugs, administrative overhead and labor, a new study released Tuesday indicates. While Americans don't use more services than people in high-income countries, the U.S.'s overall health spending still topped that of the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (Hellmann, 3/13)

A sweeping new study of health-care expenditures found that the United States spends almost twice as much on health care as 10 other wealthy countries, a difference driven by high prices — including doctors' and nurses' salaries, hospital charges, pharmaceuticals and administrative overhead. For years, it has been clear that Americans are not getting a good bang for their buck on health care. The United States spends more than any other country and gets much less, at least as measured by life expectancy or infant mortality. Policy fixes have tended to focus on the idea that medicine is being overused. The thinking goes that the American health care system is uniquely set up to incentivize wasteful imaging scans, oodles of unnecessary prescriptions and procedures that could have been prevented. (Johnson, 3/13)

Americans did rank at or near the top in several categories of healthcare utilization. For instance, they ranked first in coronary artery bypass graft surgeries (79 per 100,000 people; the average for all countries was 54 per 100,000) and total knee replacements (226 per 100,000 people; the average for all countries was 163 per 100,000). They also got the most CT scans (245 per 1,000 people; the average was 151 per 1,000) and the second-most MRIs (118 per 1,000 people; the average was 82 per 1,000). But overall healthcare use was “relatively similar to other high-income nations,” the researchers found. Even in the areas where the U.S. was at or near the top, “this utilization did not appear to explain a large part of the higher spending in the U.S.” (Kaplan, 3/13)

As Americans grapple with the rising cost of medicines, a new analysis shows that the U.S. had the highest spending per capita among nearly a dozen other high-income countries. Specifically, U.S. spending per capita on pharmaceuticals was $1,443, despite the fact that generics represented 84 percent of the U.S. market, the largest tally among the 11 countries that were examined. The mean spending per capita was $749, according to the analysis, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Retail spending per capita was also highest in the U.S., at $1,026. (Silverman, 3/13)