Finnished
Wednesday, December 10 2008
Matt Yglesias goes to Finland, and so his blog is now all things Finnish. Incidentally, I went to Finland on business several years ago – in March. It’s a cold, cold place, but beautiful enough from the indoors looking out. I also discovered smoked reindeer, which is quite tasty.
I’m not so much concerned with Finland, but I do want to mention this post of Matt’s. He points to the graph as comparison of Finnish and American health care, but it’s also interesting for what it says about OECD averages. By percent of GDP, government spending in the US is about average; private spending is much more than average.
Granted there’s a rationale for normalizing to GDP, but it’s nonetheless interesting to look at absolute spending figures (pdf), measured in US dollars. You’ll see from this that US spending per capita was $6,102, far above the OECD average of $2,550. What’s really striking is that the US government’s share of per capita spending – 45% for $2,746 – is itself higher than the OECD average for combined (public and private) per capita spending. Granted, the OECD has some laggards bringing that average down, but our government still pays more per capita than the total per capita expenditues of Ireland, the UK, Japan – or even Finland.
