The US spends twice as much on healthcare as other developed nations and gets worse outcomes - and the reasons why show what it's going to take to reform healthcare

AP

Stacy Crites, right, a nurse on campus at the University of Washington's Hall Health Primary Care Center in Seattle, listens to the lungs of Kandice Joyner, left, a junior studying archaeology, during a routine check-up on Dec. 15, 2014.

• A new review in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that America spends about twice as much as other high-income countries on healthcare.
• At the same time, the health outcomes, or how well people fare with their health, aren't any better and are often worse than countries that spend half as much on healthcare as the US does.
• The study's authors concluded that the main reason the US spends so much has to do with the prices of labor, goods (like pharmaceuticals), and administrative costs - not how often Americans get certain procedures, which was no more than any other country.

The US healthcare system has seen a lot of changes in the past decade, from the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, to attempts to dismantle it, to criticism of high prices.

Through all of that, policymakers and the public have been trying to determine why the US spends so much on healthcare.

In a review published in March in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard Global Health Institute, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, found that the US spent about twice as much on healthcare as other other high-income countries.

At the same time, outcomes were no better and healthcare wasn't used any more frequently than the other countries.

The researchers found that what's different, as far as US healthcare spending goes, is what the country spends on labor, goods like prescription drugs, and administrative costs.

"As patients, physicians, policy makers, and legislators actively debate the future of the US health system, data such as these are needed to inform policy decisions," the researchers concluded.

The review compared up US healthcare against the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Here's how the country stacked up.

• Drawing from public health reports and policy analysis, it found that the US spent 17.8% of its GDP on healthcare in 2016. The country that spent the least percentage of its GDP on healthcare was Australia, which spent 9.6%.
• At the same time, the US was the least-insured country among the group, with only about 90% of the population insured while all other countries had closer to 99-100% of their population insured.
• While the US did have some things stacked against it - the most obese or overweight population, and highest poverty rate, for example - it also had the lowest percentage of the population that was below 65.
• The US had the highest administrative burden, spending about 8% of its GDP on administration and governance - on average, other countries spent about 3%.
• The review found that US routinely spent the most on pharmaceuticals, followed by Switzerland.
• Despite what the researchers said is a common perception of the US, the country does not have a higher number of specialist doctors compared to other countries.