Extracted from an article by Martin Kettle published in July 1209:

If you take nothing else away from reading this, please take this one amazing fact. Health spending accounts for 16% of America's GDP (the figure for the UK is 8.4%) and is projected by some to rise to 20% by 2017. Put another way, this means that health spending currently accounts for a sixth of the entire US economy and within a decade will account for a fifth. Since the US already spends around $2 trillion of its total annual wealth on healthcare this means that US health spending exceeds the entire annual GDP of nations such as Brazil or Italy. If the US healthcare system was itself a country, it would be a member of the G20 and probably even the G8.
...
The big difference between Americans and Europeans is not quality of health or quality of treatment but the difference in healthcare costs. In the US, hospital care, outpatient care and medicines all cost far more than they cost elsewhere

Shrewd geezer that Mo Farah.