The US Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Health Care spending chasm: better understanding some of the reasons for the gap and some suggestions as to how it might be narrowed.

Comparisons of health care spending between the United States and the rest of the world are frequently made. This article examines macrolevel secondary data comparing health care spending in the United States and other OECD countries, but this comparison does not necessarily present a complete picture. This article puts the US OECD health care spending gap into better context by examining the implications of population differences, quality-of-life spending, obesity trends, and defensive medicine and their contribution to US health care costs.