I was thinking about Paul Krugman’s claim that the Affordable Care Act is saving us money when I remembered a graph I made in 2014. My graph showed the life expectancy at birth vs. health spending per capita for various countries in 2011. An updated graph should show the progress the Affordable Care Act made at saving us money.

Did The Affordable Care Act Make Our Health Care Costs Better Or Worse?

According to the OECD the United States spent $8,508 per person in 2011 to achieve a life expectancy of 78.7 years. In 2013 the United States spent $8,743 to achieve a life expectancy of 78.8 years. This means we spent an extra 2.7% to achieve a 0.1% gain in life expectancy. For the amount of money the United States is spending we should expect our life expectancy would be 84.6 years. When you compare these numbers to a country like Denmark it looks like we got a really bad deal. Denmark spent an extra 1.2% to achieve a 0.6% gain in life expectancy. The United States spent way too much money on health care in 2011 to achieve average health care outcomes. The Affordable Care Act was going to fix that problem by creating affordable health care. The graph below shows that this ratio is still way outside of band of developed countries in 2013. Using these simple metrics the Affordable Care Act made our health care cost problem much worse.

OECD Life expectancy at birth vs. health spending per capita