Switzerland is also the closest in per capita healthcare cost to the US. Though it is a significant amount lower - I think one could draw a graph of percentage private operators in the health system vs per capital healthcare costs and have a pretty straightforward correlation.
I'm not sure. Switzerland seems to spend about the same as Germany in the last couple of years (of course the German system is also privatized to a significant degree) but Swiss GDP per capita is much higher.
If we look at spending as % of GDP Switzerland is actually below both Germany and France and about on par with Britain (~11%) while US spend more than 16.5%.
Netherlands where IIRC the system is also almost entirely private just with heavily regulated pricing is even a bit lower than all of the countries I mentioned.
Then again Switzerland and the Netherlands has a quite a bit younger population than Germany (median is lower by about 5 years) which must also play a part.
I wouldn’t dismiss a comparison vs percentage GDP, but it is a little different than absolute expenditure and abstracts the some aspects out differently. Absolute per capita expenditures if nothing else seems a little less volatile.
But I don't agree about comparing absolute spending. Of course there are caveats when using GDP but you really can't expect countries where salaries and other costs are much higher like Switzerland to not spend quite a bit more than poorer countries (and this doesn't really say much about the system itself). So we should at least adjust the absolute per capita spending by PPP.
PPP is a fair consideration, but Covid I think threw a lot of gdp relative measures out of whack for 2020-2022. And of course as mentioned in other threads, many of the national healthcare systems have significant regulation of procedure and drug prices. Switzerland also iirc has enough public hospital services that it serves as an additional anchor to check private pricing.
