The original title finished with the word "combined". Even still is not clear what they're saying until halfway through the article.
> This means the U.S. government spent more on health care last year than the governments of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Austria, and France combined spent to provide universal health care coverage to the whole of their population (335 million in total), which is comparable in size to the U.S. population of 331 million.
They lumped together six countries to get something with a similar population and use that as the comparison. Of course you may argue that the US is too exceptional to compare, this wasn't addressed.
Population density relative to population. The US is not dense. There are legitimately strategies that will not work for us given some of our "large population centers" are actually pretty tiny when considering hpw developed we are. This is also why the US has 3rd world problems like issues getting water and electricity to some citizens. The population density in some states can drop very very low and we have a lot of people on those low density areas. It becomes a horrible last mile problem.
Honestly, I'd like to hear from Canadas and Australians about the rural experience. They have the same density problems and I think their solutions are nore relevant. That said, I'm not really a fan of the outcomes from Canada, so who knows maybe high population, low density is just a bad hand for a country in this context.
> This means the U.S. government spent more on health care last year than the governments of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Austria, and France combined spent to provide universal health care coverage to the whole of their population (335 million in total), which is comparable in size to the U.S. population of 331 million.
They lumped together six countries to get something with a similar population and use that as the comparison. Of course you may argue that the US is too exceptional to compare, this wasn't addressed.