My understanding is this - the report claims that the US spends ~$9,000 per capita for health care. In the same row, they break that out into $4,000 in public funds and programs, $1000 out of pocket private and ~$3500 "other".

Per their own document, the "public" part of those funds only cover 34% of the population and do not include government-mandated health care premiums that employers pay. Since all of the other nations the "public" funds covers everyone, the totals of public, private (out of pocket) and private (other) make sense, but here they do not.

So by that logic, if we were adding them together in a sum it should be:
(4,000 * 0.34) + (4,500 * 0.66) = 1,360 + 2,970 = 4,330. Let's be generous and assume that with some people paying more and some people paying less that even creeps up to $5,500. That's still not the massive increase claimed.

As I'm interested in making sure I'm not overlooking anything - where does the $9,000 number come from otherwise and what do you see the correctly-stated conclusion to be?

Most people will point back to this report http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/oct/us-health-care-from-a-global-perspective claiming that we spend more than 2x everyone else on our health care. But look carefully at the numbers as it's divided into public (e.g. the government pays) and private spending (a citizen pays out of pocket) and they note that 34% of the us citizens are on public programs - and the public number would be higher if they counted employer-mandated health care.

What does that mean? It means that the US is actually spending $4,000 per capita, either publicly or privately, NOT the $9,000 claimed by the report. Our cancer outcomes are much better than anyone in the world, but we get dinged by the report for having lower quality of life and worse outcomes with obesity-related diseases.

But I would argue that's often not a health system failure, but a cultural failure. We don't slow down enough to sit and eat our meals, we eat them on the go or in our cars or while writing emails on our personal devices and cope by drinking sugar and caffeine to keep us going.

About the "government is accountable" claim, it's bunk when the citizens won't hold them accountable, in fact it's worse as a company needs to be lean enough to turn a profit where the government can play the shell game to just reach further into our pockets. Judging by how medicare is going, once single-payer comes into play, there will be mainly large corporate players who are the medical providers as they'll be able to absorb the cost via volume rather than your neighborhood doctor who won't be able to afford the cut rates and high paperwork overhead that will be demanded.

We need real solutions - single payer may be one, but we need to have an honest discussion about what that means and what we will be willing to both pay for in tax increases and take in cuts to our current level of care.

Let's not conflate _visual_ simplicity with functional simplicity because the google homepage is not simple as described. The image is not a simple image, it's either the logo or a doodle that gets updated on various days or times. The text box is a regular text box until one starts typing or clicks the mic icon to speak a search, then it changes to a predictive search and starts showing results to get users to where they want to go more quickly. The top bar is not just decoration, it's links to other google apps and a user/login widget.

Since 99.9999% of websites cost money to build, maintain and serve to clients and since a majority of clients are interested in free content rather than paying for content, it's either selling product or services, showing ads or eating the cost to cover the cost of building and running the site. Ads are terrible and bloat out most web pages as they only care about the ad being shown and additional services require engagement from users. This results in annoying behavior for users as they've learned to ignore ads on pages or use ad blockers, so now it's an entitlement fight - but remember that content creators don't have to create content. :-)

As well, _most_ of the little sites (blogs, etc) use some sort of CMS framework to drive it and their owners want the blog to both look nice and have engagement features like sharing, etc., which requires more assets and more downloading than "simple" sites. Not only this, but users expect websites to work and look great on any device they fancy reading webpages on, so now there must be a bunch of responsive work and extra code to handle this kind of thing nicely. Generally that means developers will use a framework like boostrap or material design to accomplish it. This increases page bloat but is offset by better caching of the library if using a CDN correctly.

Going back to google.com, the reason there's so much code in a "simple" page is that the guts of most of the logic for displaying the page and its widgetry is now working from the web browser instead of the server. It cuts down on page reloading and speeds up how quickly they connect users with their search results. And Google's front page and searching are _not_ slow.

TL;DR google.com is not simple and there's no such thing as free - it always costs someone something.