Center in the News

Americans spend more on health care than any other people — about one-sixth of our nation’s GDP. According to Thomas Rice, Ph.D., at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, our health care expenses are double that of other wealthy nations, like Germany, Japan and the U.K.

“We spend over $4 trillion in the United States each year on health care. It's a large chunk of the entire world spending on health care, around 40%. But if you look at it per person, we spend about $12,500 per person per year on health care,"" he told NBCLX.

But the relationship of other countries to fee-for-service medicine is somewhat complicated, according to Thomas Rice, PhD, professor of health policy and management at the University of California Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health. For example, he said in an email, "Canada is known for relying on fee-for-service, but in Ontario, the largest province, there is mainly a mix of capitation, salary, and P4P [pay for performance]-type payments." The Netherlands "combines capitation and fee-for-service with global payments for certain procedures, and a small amount of P4P," he said.