Austin Frakt had a very interesting piece in the Upshot the other day, on U.S. health spending – and U.S. health — in international perspective. Everyone knows that U.S. spending is more or less literally off the charts compared with everyone else, while many are aware that we have also diverged, in the wrong direction, on measures like life expectancy: we’re falling further than further behind the rest of the advanced world.

What Frakt points out is that it was not always thus. The dismal U.S. combination of high costs and poor results only began to emerge around 1980, which poses a mystery: