This project was prompted by a friend's Facebook post regarding the brokeness of the American healthcare system. That resonated with my professional experience with the US Gov't, where everything seemed to be inordinately expensive. Begin with the casually constructed research question, "Has US healthcare spending increased since the inception of Medicare more quickley than healthcare outcomes have improved?"
This is a simplistic analysis of the relationship between healthcare spending as a % of GDP and healthcare outcomes as measured by life expectancy. As explained in main.R, I located US gov't data on spending and life expectancy, then applied the ETL process as described. I plotted the data for life expectancy and spending on the same x and y scales, which didn't really mean or show much. So I normalized the life expectancy data by "LifeExpectancy/(70.2/5.6)" which is the ratio of life expectancy to percent GDP spending in 1966 (the year after LBJ signed Medicare into law, denoted by the vertical black line on the graph).
============> "SpendingOutcomes.png" takes you right to the bottom line. <============
Still to address: I now (31Jul2024) that I neglected to track gov't healthcare spending as a percentage of overall healthcare spending.
Quite obviously, there are a lot of legitimate questions about this methodology. But as a 30,000 ft level overview of how healthcare outcomes have tracked healthcare spending I believe it's worth considering.