Since the 1990s, insurance premiums had averaged double-digit annual increases. America was spending more than $7,500 per person per year — 50 percent more than Norway, the next-largest contender. Health spending alone was chewing up one-sixth of the U.S. economy, double that of competitors like Japan.
Worse, we were paying Maserati premiums for something that looked like a used Kia. Though pols such as House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) loved to bray that America had “the best health-care delivery system in the world,” it wasn’t remotely so. The World Health Organization ranked us an embarrassing 36th, behind Costa Rica, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. Other rankings routinely place the United States near the bottom of the industrialized world.
“We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t any healthier for it,” Obama told Congress in 2009. “This is one of the reasons that insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages.”