Visual Capitalist January 4, 2026
Key Takeaways
- Life expectancy is one proxy for comparing health outcomes across countries.
- The U.S. spends more than twice as much per capita on healthcare as other high-income countries, yet has a lower life expectancy than the OECD average.
- Several factors—many outside the healthcare system itself—help explain this gap.
As Warren Buffett popularized: “Price is what you pay, value is what you get”.
Just because someone pays the most, doesn’t mean that they extract the biggest payoff from a product or service.
Today’s visual from Our World in Data that compares life expectancy with healthcare spending per capita hints at exactly this paradox.
Interactive Version
First of all, here’s an interactive version of the chart above to play...
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